Victoria beckham
beauty
The Victoria Standard
What
Brand narrative and tone of voice for a four year-old, founder-led beauty brand's next act.
Role: Copy, concept
Agency: Sui Generis Cartel
Design and art direction: Work by Holiday
Strategy: Natalee Ranii-Dropcho
The Work
BRIEF: A brand evolution to allow Victoria Beckham Beauty to grow beyond dependency on its founder while retaining all the potent associations of her public persona.
BRAND NARRATIVE: In each era of her career, the essence of Victoria Beckham's success has been her unfailing ability to know the best and an iron determination to never accept less. To deliver on our ‘Pure Excellence’ positioning, we distilled this truth into The Victoria Standard: A narrative that promises relentlessly clean, absolute quality for beauty audiences of the same uncompromising mindset.
CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT: To allow the brand voice to develop independently while Victoria remained central, we created a dual-persona voice architecture. The brand's narrator persona — the Avid Insider — lifts the curtain on Victoria's role as the Exacting Aficionado, the protagonist and guarantor of quality.
This structure solved two problems at once: It gave the brand a voice that could operate without Victoria's direct participation in every communication, and it balanced the intensity of a story built on relentless excellence by imbuing the brand narrator with the subversive sense of humor the Victoria herself has become known for.
By allowing Victoria to be in on the joke without ever making the joke, it made space for more of the depth of Victoria’s personality without ever compromising her role as the standard-bearer for quality.
DELIVERY: A comprehensive brand story, product narrative framework, tone of voice guide, creative playbook and internal manifesto equipped the in-house team with a foundation for all future comms.
IN A LINE: Better. Best. Beckham.