Bringing a new beauty brand to life and creating an engaging ecommerce platform

Niche & Cult is the brilliant brainchild of beauty entrepreneur Michele Riley. Michele is the founder of the Konjac Sponge Company and introduced the remarkable Korean sponges into our bathrooms way before all the copycats and K-beauty even became a thing. Never one to settle for a single success, her eye for innovation and sourcing specialist products from the far east led her to set up an additional business to house them all. Step forward Niche & Cult.

Valiant was appointed to bring the idea of Niche & Cult to life – both on and offline. The beauty sector is highly competitive with disruptor brands bringing new, innovative products to market quickly. Beauty branding is also subject to fast changing fashion trends. Our challenge was to create a strong brand identity and voice whilst not overpowering the brands of the many diverse, innovative products Michele and her team had sourced. A fine balance was required. The company’s target market is both B2B and B2C. Niche and Cult had to provide the technology platform to support online shopping and campaigns for consumers, whilst also creating a simple back end function allowing stockists of the products to order and manage their accounts online.

Valiant ran an in-depth discovery process to fully understand Niche & Cult’s business strategy. In this session we explore ideal audiences – both consumers and stockists, differentiators, competitors, values and business objectives. Only once we are armed with this information can we start actioning the creative process. The Niche & Cult logo is an elegant identity supported with strong imagery and typography as well as a flexible colour palette. A key influence in our design process was how the logo and imagery worked in an online environment. Animation, video and strong messaging are essential in this competitive market.

With the branding direction agreed the next focus was the planning for the website – looking in detail at user journey, experience, design and development choices. We agreed to build the site using WordPress and WooCommerce. Our in-house developers created a bespoke site with fully customised E-commerce function – this is what gives the site a true branded journey right through to checkout.

With the products uploaded and the content in place, including a sensational lead video, the new website and branding went live to rave reviews. This quickly prompted a surge of design and website awards, including recognition from the respected Awwwards.