Building a brand identity from scratch, before the product existed.
Salt Science came to me at the earliest possible stage: a founder with an idea, no product yet, and a need to assess whether the concept would land in the market before committing to development. The brand needed to be real enough to test with, including a logo, a full identity system, and three packaging mock-ups that could generate lifestyle imagery for ads. The creative would do the market validation work before a single unit was produced.
The brand's positioning: premium bath soaks with a science-based approach to health and recovery, targeted at people who live an active lifestyle and take what they put in their bodies seriously. High-end ingredients, clean formulation, a crowded wellness space, and a bath soak niche that wasn't yet saturated.
A complete brand identity system — including logo, typography, color, and three packaging designs — built to occupy the precise territory the founder was targeting: where clinical rigor meets premium wellness. Considered enough to test against a real audience, and cohesive enough to build a brand from.
Defining the brand before designing it
The first step was a brand attributes exercise: a set of sliding scales that helped the founder articulate where Salt Science should sit across a series of spectrums. Mainstream or fringe. Male or female skewing. Accessible or exclusive. Modern or classic. Scientific or beauty-forward. Serious or approachable. Affordable or luxury. The exercise turned instinct into direction, and direction into something I could build a mood board from.
The mood board answered a specific question: what does scientific and luxury look like together? Not sterile, because the health and wellness space needed warmth and approachability. Not decorative, because the science-forward positioning needed credibility and precision. The answer lived somewhere between the two, and the mood board was the tool for finding it.
The logo concept
The identity was built from a study of salt crystals under a microscope: the geometric, almost architectural structures they form at a molecular level. Logo exploration started there, with crystalline substructures translated into geometric mark concepts, each one an abstraction rather than a literal representation.
The final logotype abstracts a microscopic cross-section of a salt crystal, framed by a border referencing the outline that surrounds each element on the periodic table. A clean sans-serif anchors the wordmark, modern and accessible without losing the scientific precision the brand needed to project.
Packaging
Three stand-up pouches for the first three bath soak formulations, each targeting a specific health benefit and each differentiated by color. A soft palette kept the brand connected to the wellness and beauty space while the structural system and typography held the scientific credibility. The packaging needed to work as a test artifact: real enough that a shopper could make a genuine purchase decision from it.
