Takeoff Skin.
The hero was winning. Every product after it was dimming the hero.
An architecture-first engagement for a fast-scaling performance skincare brand. We built the product system, the naming grammar, and the launch roadmap — so the founder could ship the next eighteen months of range without cannibalising the one product that got her here.
- Category
- Performance skincare
- Engagement
- Brand
- Timeline
- Mar 2024 — Feb 2025
- Stage at start
- Hero-SKU brand, DTC-led
- Stage today
- Three-tier range, architected
Takeoff arrived at our studio with an enviable problem. The hero product — a single, precision-engineered moisturiser built for long-haul travel and high-altitude dehydration — had broken through on TikTok in twelve months and repeated it on Instagram in six. Revenue was scaling. The community was loud, specific, and exactly who the founder wanted in the room.
What she did not yet have the language for was the ceiling she was approaching. Every time the team shipped a new SKU — a mask, a serum, a two-step — the hero product's clarity in the conversation thinned. Each launch added revenue and subtracted meaning. Reviews on the second and third products were polite; reviews on the hero were religious. Internally, the team sensed it. Externally, the brand was beginning to sound like a catalogue.
We were asked to "name the next three products." We declined the brief as stated and came back with a different one: we would not name the next three products, because the next three products were the symptom. The brief was architecture. Until the brand had a published hierarchy — a hero tier, an adjacent tier, an entry tier, and a stated rule for what a new SKU had to earn to join — naming each one in isolation would keep dragging the range into incoherence.
Three tiers. One hero. A published rule for when a new product earns in.
The central move of the engagement was not a product, a name, or a pack. It was an architecture — and a promise to enforce it.
We built a three-tier system. At the top, a single hero — the moisturiser — preserved, protected, and never given a sibling in the same slot. In the middle, a small cohort of heroes-adjacent products, each required to extend the hero's use case rather than compete with it. At the entry tier, a tightly edited introduction range priced and formatted for first-time customers, with an explicit ladder to the hero.
Each tier had a written rule — what the product must do, what it must not do, what question it must answer that no other product in the range already answers. We killed the internal practice of "we have an idea for a product" and replaced it with a test: which tier does it earn into, and which rule does it satisfy? New ideas that failed the test did not go to design. They went to the cut file.
What we shipped- A published three-tier architecture with written entry rules.
- A "one hero" covenant — protected from internal line extension.
- An adjacency doctrine — each middle-tier product must extend, never compete.
- A cut-file discipline — ideas that do not earn in do not ship.
A naming grammar — so the range speaks in one voice.
Each product had been named by whoever was nearest. The result was a range that read like four founders arguing. We wrote one grammar.
We built a naming system with three fixed elements and one variable. Every product name now follows the same construction: a plain-English action verb, a quiet modifier, and — only where earned — a single proprietary term from the brand's own lexicon. No adjectives borrowed from competitor aisles. No unearned Latin. No pseudo-clinical shorthand.
The hero kept its original name — a decision we argued for harder than the team expected. Rename the hero and you risk rewriting the story the customer tells themselves in the bathroom mirror. We left it untouched and rebuilt everything around it. The middle and entry tiers were renamed in a single review cycle to inherit the same grammar.
What we resolved- One naming construction across the range — no exceptions.
- Hero name preserved; everything else aligned to it.
- Category-borrowed language removed across 9 SKUs.
- Proprietary lexicon — 6 terms, written, defended, licensed for use.
A pack system that makes tier legible at arm's length.
The architecture is an internal document. The packaging is how it becomes visible. We encoded the tiers into the bottle.
The hero retained its existing silhouette — no change to the thing customers recognise before they read the label. The middle tier was given a matched silhouette with a distinct but quieter shoulder treatment — visually related, clearly secondary. The entry tier moved to a smaller, more compact format with a different closure altogether, so first-time customers could not mistake it for the hero even at a glance.
Colour hierarchy enforced the same rule. The hero held the brand's signature tone, undiluted. The middle tier used the same tone in a softer value. The entry tier sat in a warmer, more approachable adjacent palette. The brand's typographic voice — one serif, one sans — was unchanged across all three, so the range still read as one family at ten metres.
Packaging decisions- Hero silhouette preserved — zero change.
- Middle-tier matched but visually secondary.
- Entry tier reformatted — no silhouette confusion.
- Single colour hierarchy across tiers; single typographic voice.
From "what's next" to a published twenty-four-month cadence.
Before this engagement, the founder answered "what are you launching next?" differently every week. We wrote the answer down.
Using the architecture and the naming grammar, we mapped out a 24-month launch roadmap — the products that would ship, the quarters they would ship in, and — just as importantly — the quarters with no launches at all. Negative space was protected as deliberately as the launches themselves. A brand that launches monthly cannot be a hero brand; we wrote the rule and we held to it.
The roadmap was shared internally with the operating team and, in summary form, with the retail partners the brand was beginning to approach. A published roadmap is a commitment. It also, crucially, tells a buyer committee what you are refusing to do — which is as important a signal as what you are shipping.
Roadmap outputs- 24-month launch calendar with protected negative space.
- Founder briefing document for buyer conversations.
- Internal product-ops RACI built around the architecture.
- Quarterly architecture review — built into the operating rhythm.
A small sample of the shipped system.
Full system documentation available to qualified buyers under NDA.
"We used to ship the next thing. Now we ship the next thing that earns in. That's a different business."
What actually moved.
Measured Mar 2024 → Feb 2025Specific volume, revenue, and retention figures omitted at client's request during live roll-out of the roadmap. Available to qualified buyers under NDA. The hero SKU, kept untouched through the engagement, remains the top-selling product in the range.
The people behind the engagement.
Engagement lead
- Jackson Morice Founder & principal
- Saoirse Hale Strategy director
Brand
- Théo Marchetti Creative director, identity
- Ada Chen Design lead, packaging
- Lena Osei Copy lead, naming & verbal
Architecture
- Saoirse Hale Architecture director
- Ned Halloran Product roadmap
Client team
- Eliza Reeve Founder & CEO
- Two-person brand team Internal
A transformation of this kind?
If your business is at a comparable inflection point — hero dilution, heritage mis-read, or a category that is catching up — write. A call with our founding team inside three working days.