toil+trouble brand identity, concept and copy

Some people baked banana bread during lockdown. Some people started new businesses. I did both.

While the endless loaves baked away in the oven, my partner, Abby and I were rustling up our very own skincare brand, toil+trouble - a gender-neutral skincare brand that took the five elements to create an interconnected range of products with ‘elemental equilibrium’ at its core.

We quite literally built everything about this brand from scratch so there are lots of chapters to this very special story. For the sake of your time-saving, I’m only going to focus on the brand voice and copy-related parts here.

You can see the full brand manual here if you want to explore more of the incredible visual identity work that the graphic designer we hired, Kev Wilson produced. Stuff of epic proportions.

There’s a great page on Kev’s website too that will give you a bit more conceptual context about our gender-neutral skincare brand if you want it.

It’s also probably worth mentioning before we go any further that toil+trouble no longer exists as a business.

My partner and I have brand and marketing magic at our fingertips. What we didn’t possess was a preposterous amount of money to pour into the paid advertising required to even start edging a skincare business towards any kind of success in a stupendously saturated market.

But still, as a brand story, a creative concept and a personal project, toil+trouble will always be something I’m excited to talk about.

Brand name and strapline

When we were building an idea of how we wanted the brand to look and feel and be positioned in the market, we came up with this summary: “The vibe of Stevie Nicks, the consciousness of Jessica Alba, the sophistication of Tom Ford and the attitude of Vivienne Westwood”.

This, amongst other key cues, helped inform our product selection, our ethos, our packaging, our supply chain and our visual brand identity - as well as our brand name and tone of voice.

Brand name

Through the (many) inspiration mood boards we created, it became clear that we wanted our brand to be monochromatic and moody.

Deeper explorations of this found us in the realms of Shakespeare - more specifically, Macbeth. That’s when we landed on ‘toil & trouble’, which later became ‘toil+trouble’ (using the ‘+’ rather than the ‘&’)for ingenious visual story-related reasons you can see in the full brand manual.

The meaning behind it? The literal toil and trouble that skincare issues cause people. The natural elements cause this toil and trouble but our products use the same natural elements to rebalance this (the concept of ‘elemental equilibrium ‘ I referenced earlier).

We spoke to an experienced branding specialist who highlighted that the name had negative connotations and encouraged us to consider that fact.

However, it was something we’d already thought long and hard about and agreed this wasn’t an issue for us as it aligned so perfectly with our desires for the brand. The attitude of Vivienne Westwood, remember.

Plus, brand names with negative connotations have worked pretty well for the likes of:

Urban Decay
FatFace
Sweaty Betty
Too Faced (play on words)
Slack (ironic)

Strapline

The strapline I devised for the brand (‘Face of the Earth’) needed to do multiple things. It needed to be catchy and memorable. It needed to be short (having product packaging and things like social media ad headline character limits in mind here). It also needed to be informative - the brand name doesn’t give much away so the strapline needed to provide more informative context.

’Face of the Earth’ communicates the skincare nature of the products. It’s short. It’s memorable. It uses the word ‘Earth’ to refer to the naturally-derived product ingredients and also the sustainable intentions of the brand.

We decided we wanted an additional tagline, which would act as a descriptor. Here, I deployed the ‘power of three’ concept to provide further context and position some KSPs - ‘Simple, conscious, elemental skincare’.

Tone of voice

To refine our tone of voice, we started with our main target customer persona - this was an embellishment of somebody we actually knew in real life. We explored the brands (skincare and way beyond) that they bought, followed, aligned with, etc., and used that to inspire the positioning of our own voice and tone.

This enabled us to get a better idea of how our target customer likes to be ‘spoken’ to and the kinds of brand TOVs that make them engage and ‘listen’.

We conducted extensive competitor analysis of other skincare and cosmetic brands we aspired to be like in terms of market position and brand image. We used this to influence our own tone and identity, while comparing them all to find where our own unique niche could be nestled.

Product names, descriptions and packaging

Creating our product names and descriptions, in line with our defined brand tone of voice was a real labour of love. I loved every single minute of it but there were many, many, many minutes (read: days) invested in a) getting them just right but also b) ensuring nothing else like it existed.

Botanical Botox - Regenerating moisturiser with hyaluronic acid + active plant botox
Bonfire Buffer - Clarifying charcoal exfoliator with burnishing liquorice root
CBD Omnipotion - Golden all-healing elixir with cannabidiol + essence of prickly pear
Hy + Dry - Hydrating serum with 2% hyaluronic acid + vitamin B5
Land + See - Calming eye gel with marine collagen + illuminating fig
Strawberry Moon - Purifying pink clay mineral mask with strawberry extract + natural hydrolysed silk
Sugar + Space - Rich face cream with honey, wheatgerm, oatmeal + banana
Virgin Skin - Marula oil cleanser with reformative rice brain + almond extract