The beauty and skincare brand Kiehl’s that is familiar to many consumers today was established in the 1960s, but the brand’s legacy goes back to a Lower Manhattan pharmacy opened in 1851. That rich, homespun history informs everything their brand is, but it had never been synthesized into a comprehensive form. So with stores opening around the globe and no way of replicating their core essence and characteristics, the brand was becoming diluted and inconsistent for shoppers.
This brand book, which I designed while at VSA, represents several months of collaboration with the Kiehl’s in-house design team to learn and source from their vast archives. It captures the best and most quintessential elements of their varied forms of expression throughout the years, and crystallizes sentiments about themselves and their customers that had been largely unspoken, and certainly never codified.
