The Skincare Brand Identity Problem

This edition of the newsletter is brought to you by Foldr.Studio for founders and teams building consumer brands where design is the difference between a commodity and a category of one.

Skincare is one category that has outsourced its identity to the same three mood boards.

Cover the logo on any skincare product. Guess the brand/manufacturer.

You can’t. Pastel packaging, clean sans-serif, generous white space, soft tonal background. A visual language that originated in Korean minimalism and Japanese restraint, got filtered through Western indie brand culture, and is now the default setting for the entire category, including brands sharing the same white-label supplier.

Design in skincare was supposed to create trust. What it created instead is a category where differentiation has collapsed at the shelf level. When nothing is distinguishable, the customer doesn't choose confidently. They choose on price, or they don't choose at all.

This is not a marketing problem. It’s a design decision whose consequences appear in revenue.

The brands that escape category blur are playing a different game. L’Occitane’s Provençal botanicals and apothecary serif communicate geographic and botanical specificity before a word is read. Kiehl’s pharmaceutical label logic signals formulation authority rather than aesthetic aspiration.

Both brands occupy a visual lane no competitor can accidentally replicate. That’s the actual function of design, not decoration, but defensible positioning made visible.

What this means for founders and brand decision-makers:

• Most brand briefs outline the market and the mood. Neither tells you what the brand actually is.

• Competitive decks and mood boards can describe the landscape but they can’t surface the brand’s internal energy.

• The brief rarely contains the brand. The founder does.

So, when a skincare founder sends me a mood board, I usually set it aside.

Mood boards tell me what you’ve been looking at. They don’t tell me what you are.

So I ask something different: If your brand were a celebrity, who would it be?

One founder said Robert Downey Jr..
Not Iron Man. The version before the franchise.

The edge. The precision. The authority that doesn’t ask for approval.

That single answer unlocked the entire visual system, palette, type, layout logic in a way no reference image ever could. Because the brief almost never contains the brand. That’s what discovery is for.

For boards evaluating brand design investment:

Visual identity is either load-bearing infrastructure or recurring cost. The difference is whether it encodes something true and specific about the business, or whether it signals category membership. Category membership is not a moat. It is the absence of one. A brand indistinguishable from its competitors at the shelf is pricing itself into a commodity dynamic regardless of what the formulation or unit economics look like.

The diagnostic is simple: remove your logo from your packaging and put it next to three competitors. If the visual system doesn’t hold its own identity without the name, the design is not doing strategic work.

Discovery is the process of surfacing what a brand actually is before a single design decision is made, it is what separates identity from aesthetics. The questions that come out of that process stay with founders long after the project ends: who they’re actually building for, what they believe, why any of it matters. Design makes that clarity visible. Without the clarity, design is just expensive camouflage.

If you’re building something and suspect your visual identity isn’t carrying its weight, You can email me on apeksha@foldr.studio

A small note before I go:

My brain doesn’t really believe in “consistent Thursday 9AM newsletters.” So I’m letting go of the schedule.

This will arrive when there’s something worth saying.
Maybe twice a week. Maybe twice a month. I won’t promise cadence, only clarity.

If you enjoy thinking about design as deeply as I do, I hope you’ll stay.

Until next time,
Apeksha