STUDIO DEVOCO

Industry — 001

Brand systems for beauty that earn the price.

For founders building the next generation of skincare and beauty — clinical, archival, restrained. The work is in what the brand chooses not to say.

Context — 001

Beauty has a saturation problem.

Every founder building a skincare brand in 2026 is fighting the same noise: ten thousand brands promising transformation, all using the same desert-rock photography, the same sans-serif lockup, the same “clean” aesthetic stripped of meaning. The brands that survive are the ones that take an actual position — on what skin is, what care means, what the product actually does. The visual system has to carry that weight without explaining it. This is the territory the studio works in: brands that understand their position is the product, and the design is what makes the position visible.

Scope — 002

What an engagement includes.

  • 01Brand strategy and positioning — written, not deck-based
  • 02Naming and verbal identity, including product nomenclature
  • 03Wordmark and typographic system, custom where the budget allows
  • 04Color and material direction — print, digital, packaging
  • 05Photography brief and art direction notes
  • 06Packaging design — primary, secondary, retail
  • 07E-commerce and editorial digital surfaces
  • 08Brand book — concise, written, never bloated

Selected work — 003

MNĒMA

A speculative luxury skincare identity built on memory rather than transformation. The premise: skin remembers what it has been through. The system reads three persistent signals — moisture, erosion, memory — and composes a ritual matched to what it finds. Identity built on Cormorant Garamond, mobile diagnostic flow, three-product packaging architecture.

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Engagement — 004

Engagement structure.

Most beauty brand engagements run at the Project tier — €5,000 to €25,000 — covering strategy, identity, primary digital surface, and a concise brand book over 4–8 weeks. Larger engagements with packaging across multiple SKUs and a full e-commerce build run at Studio Engagement (€30,000+) over 3–6 months. Quick Brief (€1,500–€5,000) suits founders who already have core identity and need a single targeted output — packaging concept, landing page, secondary product extension.

See all engagement tiers →

FAQ — Beauty & Skincare Branding

Industry-specific questions.

Do you work with founder-led beauty brands at pre-launch?

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Most of the work is exactly this — pre-launch or first-product brands where the founder is choosing the position and the visual system simultaneously. The earlier the engagement, the more cohesive the system. Brands engaged at retail-launch stage have less room to shape the verbal and visual core; we work with what's there.

How is your work different from agencies that do fifty beauty brands a year?

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Volume agencies have a house aesthetic. They produce work that looks like their other work. The brands they design start to look like each other. This studio takes 6–12 engagements a year. Each brand gets a system specific to its position — not the studio's aesthetic forced onto another founder. The downside: longer timelines, smaller capacity. The upside: brands that don't look interchangeable.

Do you handle packaging production?

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Design — yes, including dielines, print specifications, color systems for print, finish notes (foil, deboss, varnish). Production management — no. I work with your printer/manufacturer directly on file specifications, but the physical production is your team's responsibility. For founders without an existing supplier relationship, I can recommend printers in Portugal, Italy, and Germany who handle premium packaging well.

What about e-commerce — do you build the Shopify store?

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I design the Shopify experience — page architecture, product detail pages, cart and checkout flow, editorial sections. Implementation is handled either by your in-house developer or a partner I trust. I don't do Shopify development directly. The boundary is intentional: design and implementation are different disciplines, and the work is stronger when each is done by someone who specializes in it.

Does the engagement include photography?

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Direction — always. Photographer selection — sometimes. Production — no. For most engagements, I write the photography brief, source candidate photographers (typically 2–3 options matched to the brand voice), help you choose, and review final selects. The shoot itself is managed by the photographer's production team. Budgets for photography sit outside the engagement fee — typical range for a primary product shoot is €4,000–€20,000 depending on scope.

Begin — 005

A note before the work.

Tell me what you're building. I read every note personally and reply within 48 hours, in writing.

Reply within 48 hours — In writing only