Planet Beauty

Planet Beauty is Brown Thomas’s beauty universe, an identity built for the retail floor of Ireland’s most prestigious department store. But a name built for print and in-store never carried into the channels where Gen Z now lives. Winning that audience back wasn’t a cosmetic refresh; it meant rebuilding around a cohort that is value-conscious, research-led and quick to switch. Nearly half of Gen Z (48%) say they don’t feel financially secure, up from 30% a year earlier, which reframes “premium” as something that has to justify itself. And they discover before they buy: 64% use social media to research products, almost twice the rate of older generations. A brand that only showed up in-store was, to them, invisible. So we started with the audience, not the aesthetics, drawing on Deloitte’s Gen Z and Millennial Survey and category e-commerce data. What emerged was a shopper who is digital-first and stubbornly tactile, so the brief was never social versus store but one identity that had to hold up in both. This generation prizes authenticity over inherited aspiration (63% prefer brands aligned with their values) and switches readily when something resonates more. Planet Beauty couldn’t sell a standard to live up to. It had to hand people a tool for becoming themselves. That produced the platform: “The World of You,” beauty as self-authorship rather than conformity, one brand with infinite versions. The system is social-first and unapologetically vibrant, with variable fonts that flex by mood and message and motion engineered for the scroll. Verbal and visual identity were built together and tuned to context: made for the feed where Gen Z researches and shares, and for the floor where beauty stays hands-on.