Branding is not your logo. It's not your colour palette, your font, or the aesthetic of your Instagram grid. Those things are the visible surface of branding — the output of a process that, if done correctly, happens long before a designer opens a file.

A brand is the complete set of associations a person has with your product the moment they encounter it. It's what they feel before they buy, what they tell someone when they recommend you, and what they remember when they're standing in front of a shelf trying to decide. It's built deliberately or it's built accidentally. The brands built accidentally rarely survive.

For skincare specifically, branding carries extra weight because the category is saturated, trust is the primary purchase driver, and the consumer is sophisticated. They've been marketed to by every brand from The Ordinary to La Mer and they know the difference between a brand that knows who it is and one that's performing an identity it hasn't earned.

The work of branding is the work of deciding — with precision and intention — what all of those associations are going to be, before you ask a designer to make anything.

Brand strategy is the brief that makes everything downstream faster, cheaper, and more effective.

Without it, you're making decisions by feel — this logo looks nice, this colour feels premium, this tagline sounds good. Those decisions might turn out fine. They might also turn out to be the wrong signals for the wrong audience at the wrong price point, and you won't know until you've printed the packaging, built the website, and launched to silence.

Brand strategy answers the questions that can't be answered by a designer: Who specifically is this for, and who is it not for? What does this brand believe that others in the category don't? What is the single thing this brand is known for at the beginning — before you've earned the right to stand for more? Where does this brand sit in the market, and is that position genuinely ownable?

These are not soft questions. They have right and wrong answers depending on your market, your product, your distribution channel, and your commercial goals. A brand positioning that makes sense for a $28 serum on TikTok is the wrong positioning for a $120 serum in a day spa. A founder story that builds trust in a wellness context is the wrong lead for a clinical efficacy positioning. The strategy determines which signals to send — and signals misaligned with your actual market create friction that no amount of beautiful design can fix.

The strategy brief is what a designer works from. Without one, you're paying a designer to make aesthetic decisions that should have been strategic ones.

Your brand name is a strategic asset, a legal consideration, and a long-term commitment — in that order.

Most founders name their brand based on what sounds good, what's personally meaningful, or what domain is available. Those are not the right criteria, or at least not the only ones.

A good brand name for a skincare brand needs to do several things simultaneously: signal something meaningful about the brand's positioning, be distinctive enough to be ownable in a crowded category, work at small scale (on a 15ml tube, on a favicon, in a Google search result), translate without unintended meanings in the markets you plan to enter, and survive a trademark search.

That last one ends more naming processes than any other. A name you love that's already trademarked in your class is a name you can't use — not legally, not without risk. Trademark searches cost money and take time, and they need to happen before you commission logo design, before you register a domain, and before you tell anyone what your brand is called. The cost of a trademark search is trivial compared to the cost of a rebrand after launch.

International considerations matter even if you're launching domestically. If Australia is your market now but the US, UK, or EU is in a three-year plan, search those jurisdictions too. A clear name in Australia can be owned by someone else in the US, and building into a trademark conflict is a problem you don't want to solve while you're trying to scale.

How your brand speaks is as much a strategic decision as how it looks — and in skincare, where most customer touchpoints are written (product descriptions, social captions, email, packaging copy), it might be more important.

Tone of voice determines how your brand sounds across every single piece of communication: the warmth or formality of your product descriptions, the personality in your email subject lines, how you handle a customer complaint publicly, how your founder talks on camera. Consistency across all of those touchpoints is what makes a brand feel like a brand rather than a collection of disconnected assets.

Where founders go wrong is treating tone of voice as a vibe — "we're warm and approachable" or "we're clinical and credible" — without translating that into actual language principles that everyone touching the brand can apply consistently. Vague tone guidance produces inconsistent execution. Inconsistent execution erodes trust. In a category where trust is everything, that erosion is expensive.

Tone of voice also needs to be calibrated to your audience with the same precision as your visual identity. The language that resonates with a 28-year-old discovering actives for the first time is not the language that resonates with a 45-year-old who knows exactly what an ingredient does and wants the proof, not the poetry.

Every brand decision sends a signal. Most founders are only conscious of about half of them.

Your price point signals quality positioning before anyone reads a word of copy. Your choice of retailer signals who you're for — a brand in Chemist Warehouse and a brand in an independent apothecary are communicating different things to their respective customers even if the formula is identical. Your founder story, if you lead with it, signals that authenticity and origin matter to your brand — which creates an expectation of transparency that has to be maintained consistently. Your packaging weight, texture, and finish signal premium or accessible before the product is opened. Your choice of who you collaborate with, who you gift to, and who you're seen next to in retail all become part of the brand's associations over time.

None of these signals are accidental in a well-built brand. All of them are controlled. The work of brand strategy is making those decisions consciously and ensuring they're all pointing in the same direction — because one misaligned signal can undermine the entire positioning, and consumers notice even when they can't articulate what feels off.