Brand Design Study: Beauty Pie

What is Beauty Pie?

Beauty Pie is a cosmetics brand that markets themselves as a "luxury beauty products Buyers’ Club". Basically they explain that they sell the same quality products as other luxury brands but instead of spending money on marketing, celebrity endorsements and by selling directly to customers instead of selling thru retailers. Beauty Pie has transparent pricing and offers products for 80% less than typical pricing. Though to buy from Beauty Pie they require that you become a member which works kind of like a subscription, but you get pay a set amount every month that rolls over and you can choice which products to order for those credits whenever you want to. Even with this they are quite affordable.

Skincare products from Beauty Pie in white or transparent packaging

Does that minimalist packaging design look familiar?

If you are at all paying attention to high end skincare in the last years this style of packaging is probably very familiar to you. The Scandinavian Minimalism style has been adopted by a lot of luxury cosmetics brands and the visual style can also be found in many other industries. Some popular brands are Herbivore, Byredo and French Girl

Skincare products from beauty pie in minimalist baby pink and white packaging

Minimalist Labels

There is a common pattern to the look of this minimalist style that Beauty Pie fits neatly into. They have black plain sans serif font (in this case futura). Its neatly arranged into a small, medium and large composition. With the the brand name as the medium at the top, the name of the product as the large in the middle and the small being a longer text at the bottom with more information about the product. The text is on a solid color background, most commonly used is white but a fair amount use pale pastel solid colors or invert the colors using white on black text. For clear bottles a lot of brands opt for a white sticker label with the black text on it but Beauty Pie instead has just the text making the contents of the bottle the background. Which is also fairly common but not as common.

Black and white, but add pink!

A common favorite is using pink as an accent colour to compliment the black and white. Any accent colours used with this style will really pop against the simple design and many brands take advantage of this. Beauty Pie's brand palette consists of pure black, pure white, three shades of pink and a light grey. They also use green, baby blue and orange for some of their product lines.

Beauty Pie Color Palette — Beauty Pie's colour palette

Beauty Pie's Plantastic product line, minimalist green packaging — Beauty Pie's Plantastic product line

Style of photography

Beauty Pie's photos usually have a simple plain color background. They have flat lighting with sharp shadows. They use a lot of pink in most of their photos.

Collage of Beauty Pie's lifestyle photography style

My thoughts on Beauty Pie

I really like their packaging design and their branding. They are clear with what they are selling and why you would want it. Of the minimalist cosmetics brands packaging I've seen this is one of my favorites.

Beauty Pie