Mayo | Our Story

WHY MAYO?

Ever since we worked together for the first time, we’ve talked about starting a branding studio together someday (with a similar enthusiasm to how a kid talks about being a ballerina-princess-astronaut). And maybe not dissimilar to how that kid might name a stuffed animal, we called this hypothetical someday studio “Mayo”, Maya and Koko combined.
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We started out the quarter with a completely different capstone in mind. Perhaps one much more fitting for a senior capstone, one about design philosophy. But after weeks of research and writing about design, it stopped making sense that we were just writing about design and not creating. For us, we found that our philosophies were best lived out, not written.
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So when our first idea capsized, we thought, why not do it? Why not brand Mayo? We know we can do the doing part.
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We discussed our vision for our studio's branding and realized there wasn’t enough to make. We wanted to do more than create brand guidelines, we wanted an excuse to work with our hands too. So we pivoted away from branding a studio to branding a skincare line with the same name. We’re both interested in beauty and branding, so we combined our names and our interests to create an admittedly self-indulgent brand.
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OUR INSPIRATION

We’re both half Japanese, so we took inspiration from the visual language of Kewpie Mayonnaise, a Japanese mayo company. We use a similar vibrant red as our main brand color, which we use on the lids, just as the Kewpie Mayo bottle does. We began with this simple nod to our inspiration, but later in the process, brought in a much more direct reference.
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The name Kewpie comes from the baby illustration that they use as their logo. But it did not originate with the mayonnaise company. Kewpie was a comic character, created by female illustrator Rose O’Niell in the early 1900’s. Kewpie quickly gained popularity and became the most widely recognized cartoon character until Mickey Mouse, 20 years later. It’s popularity made O’Niell the most successful female illustrator in the US.
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Kewpie was genderless, and years later was used to promote women’s suffrage. A google search of the Kewpie illustration will show the baby in various political cartoons. As two women in an adjacent field to O’Niell, and in a parallel time in history with the current Black Lives Matter movement, this discovery felt like a validating serendipity.
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D2C BRAND RESEARCH

This project was a reason to create, but we also used it as an opportunity too research direct-to-consumer brands. We’re both Quip subscribers, Billie subscribers, have purchased from Kin, and are Glossier loyalists to a fault. But we aren’t the only ones. D2C brands have captured the attention of many people in our age-range, who tend to develop a strong brand loyalty. There are many factors that this success can be attributed to, but we’ve identified 5 relevant to design and have applied these to Mayo: selling a lifestyle, brand personality, transparency, social media presence, and beautiful visuals.
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+ LIFESTYLE

Successful director-to-consumer brands always sell something they believe in. It’s often just as much about their ethos as it is about their product. Glossier’s mission is to democratize beauty. (1) Away believes travels helps you get more out of life, (2) and Billie stands against gender discrimination, selling pink razors without the Pink Tax. (3)

Because we were heavily alluding to mayonnaise, we framed our products as a clean beauty company, with our slogan as “beauty clean enough to eat.” We include references, some overt, some more subtle to food through our imagery, copy, icons, and illustrations. (We live it too, considering plenty of people do eat “our products” on a daily basis.)
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+ PERSONALITY

Most brands have a “personality” or positioning key words that internally guide how a brand portrays itself. However this personality is especially strong in the direct-to-consumer brands we looked at. This, in part, is due to social media. These platforms for digital engagement give brands a place to convey their personality much more than a traditional brand.

Glossier might be summed up as effortless and cool. Their products require little knowledge or experience with makeup, and their result is a low-maintenance “no-makeup, makeup” look. Through their photography and brand voice they manage to pull off “easy, breezy beautiful” better than CoverGirl ever did.
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For Mayo, we chose to focus on three personality traits: Fresh, Bold, and Approachable.

Fresh: Among the many clean beauty brands on the market, cliches of this kind of framing include distressed or handwritten type and the use of green and other natural colors to assure the customer that the product came from the ground.

We go about framing Mayo as clean through the atypical medium of mayonnaise. This provided not just a substance that made sense for us to use, but also a visual language informed by Japanese food packaging that sets us drastically apart from other hypothetical competitors.

Bold: The red color and the name are undeniably bold. Our saturated still life photography features hard shadows that differentiate us from other beauty brands that tend to favor a softer, more classically feminine aesthetic.

Approachable: Fresh and bold both embody a strength that we love about our brand, but we wanted to include something more fun and approachable to draw people in. This is why we decided to bring Kewpie in as a graphic element. A mascot that exists mostly on social media and merchandise, little Kewpie gives our brand an adorable face for people to latch onto.
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+ TRANSPARENCY

Everlane exposes its supply chain to its customers, not only opening themselves up to scrutiny, but encouraging their customers to #KnowYourFactories. (1)

The Ordinary is a skincare brand whose products all have one active ingredient, and the name of the product is simply the name of the active ingredient, and it is up to the customer to pair products that will work well for them rather than buying a pre-blended formula. The appeal is both the incredibly low price point and the fact that the inner workings of what skincare does to your skin is exposed and digestible. (2)

So in the name of transparency, if you haven’t guessed by now. Yes, we did use mayonnaise.
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Social Media engagement has become an obvious marketing platform, but it didn’t start out that way. Early Internet personalities gained a following basically by accident, by being themselves. At the time, there was no way for them to monetize their internet presence, but these people built more loyal followings than mainstream celebrities because they were authentic and relatable. Fans were there for them, not a role they played in a movie.

Influencers also often build an audience slowly, making the audience feel like they grew with them, like they “discovered them before they we’re famous”, which contributes to the loyalty of their audience. A study conducted by Alexander Schouten, Loes Janssen and Maegan Verspageet in June 2019 concluded that “influencers are deemed more trustworthy than celebrities, and that people feel more similar to influencers and identify more with them than celebrities. These processes, in turn, affect advertising effectiveness.” (1)

Though they may not have the name recognition that mainstream celebrities have, YouTubers and micro-influencers have much higher engagement rates on social media. On Instagram, Kim Kardashian has a 1.53% engagement rate and Ariana Grande has a 1.17% engagement rate, while fashion YouTuber Ashley from the channel bestdressed has a 27.3% engagement rate and TikToker Charli D’amelio has a 25.27% engagement rate.

Although Kim Kardasian has 175 million instagram followers and Charli D’Amelio has 20 million, their engagement rates bring the number of people that engage with one post to 2.7 million and 5 million respectively, making D’Amelio’s engagement almost twice that of Kardashian’s. (2)

The success of direct-to-consumer brands when compared to traditional corporations parallels that of the success of internet personalities. This grassroots feeling permeates a brand’s social media when social media is it’s main marketing platform from the beginning. Although brands like Glossier and Parade have less instagram followers than L’Oreal and Revlon, their engagement rates are much higher: Glossier at 1.74% and Parade at 2.71% compared to L’Oreal Paris at 0.15% and Revlon at 0.08%. (3)

This is partly because the young people who are their target audience are the ones on social media. But part of the appeal is an almost anti-establishment internet subculture that contrasts big corporations that pump out cheap product. As one of the most well known direct-to-consumer brands, Glossier demonstrates this well. Glossier’s slogan is to “democratize beauty”, and they have been successful in breaking down the image of the beauty industry as something intimidating and unattainable to something approachable and democratic. And those qualities are exactly what internet culture is all about; everyone gets to cast a vote with their follows, likes, and comments. (4)

That is why we decided that two of our deliverables would be social media accounts: an Instagram and a TikTok.* A following on Instagram is a good indicator for the success of a direct-to-consumer company, and even for other types of businesses, an instagram is now essential marketing tool.
TikTok however, is a platform not many brands have begun to use (even Glossier has not posted at all, though they do have an empty account). However scrolling through the explore page on Instagram, many of the videos are reposted TikToks. Currently, three years after TikTok’s launch, it has 800 million active monthly users. It took Instagram six years to reach that number. We believe it is only a matter of time before TikTok becomes a major marketing platform alongside Instagram.
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*Due to the murder of George Floyd and the protests that have followed, we decided it was the wrong time to post this content to Instagram, at the risk of taking away from the educational material in people’s feeds. We have content prepared and would like to create these accounts at some point. If you would like to follow them, both our Instagram and TikTok handles are @mayo.skin.
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+ BEAUTIFUL VISUALS

Beautiful visuals are something that is often acknowledged as an afterthought. But one glance at successful direct-to-consumer brands show impeccable and consistent execution. Many direct-to-consumer brands hire artists. Glossier has hired photographer Suzanne Saroff and floral artist Brittany Asch, Billie has hired (Seattle-based!) photographer Ashley Armitage. Each of these artists have over 100,000 instagram followers, so their work would come at a cost, but some of these companies are willing to pay for their brand to be beautiful. And although we’re big fans of beauty for it’s own sake, a business would need more incentive, and that incentive is that beauty sells. Perhaps an age-old saying, but worth its weight. Sagmeister and Walsh’s branding of Fugue, a software company, demonstrates this.

Fugue, a data software company, develops software that replaces itself several times per second, eliminating the need for scheduled updates. Sagmeister and Walsh took this concept of regeneration and depicted it in an ephemeral visual language, a clear departure from the strong lines, safes and padlocks that are typically more reminiscent of software security companies.

“Fugue’s main marketing opportunities take place within specialized trade shows attended by chief technology officers of large companies. When Fugue launched its new branding, its comparatively small booth was mobbed by international technology executives, and its T-Shirts and tote bags were the most popular at the show. Beauty Functioned.” (1)

Beauty can sell units in a very concrete and measurable way because of factors that are a bit harder to grasp. As evolutionary biologist Dennis Dutton said: “Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? No, its deep in our minds.” An example he cites is that of the stone axe. Archeologists found axes dating back 2.4-1.4 million years ago that were remarkably symmetrical, so much so, that they seemed to have made them symmetrical at the cost of maximum functionality. And upon closer inspection, there were no signs of use. There were functional axes, and decorative axes, and in the midst of surviving harsh weather and warding off prehistoric creatures, people wearing animal pelts still managed to find time to make things just because they were joyful. We are conditioned by evolution to enjoy beauty. (2)

Dr. Helmut Leder and Dr. Gernot Gerger conducted an experiment at the Empirical Visual Aesthetics Lab in Vienna in which sets of images were categorized by participants as clearly beautiful, or clearly not beautiful. While hooked up to a device that picks up very subtle muscle movements, participants were shown these images for 1/25 of a second, far too short a time for them to process the image they were looking at. The results showed that all participants’ smiling muscles contracted when they were shown the beautiful images. (3) (4)

Although we will let you judge whether or not we were successful, one of the explicit goals of our work in this project and in every one we create is beauty. It isn’t a secondary priority, not something we would get to if we had time, but something we were conscious of every step of the way. This is why we decided to take it into our own hands to create every piece of this brand (but, ironically, the mayonnaise) ourselves. We hope we can continue to create beauty that brings successful brands and joy to viewers.