Luxury Wellness & Gifting
Sacred Space
Brand strategy, visual identity, and packaging for a luxury spiritual wellness brand.
- My role
- Brand lead: strategy, identity, packaging, copy, web
- When
- From June 2020
What came of it
revenue at launch, across product and website
The brand was retired in a rebrand about a year later. The provenance score worked as an idea, but the client's margins didn't hold it.
The brief
Two founders launching a premium candle and ritual brand into a category where every competitor says the same things about intention and calm. It needed to justify a luxury price next to Aesop and Bamford, and it needed something concrete to say beyond a feeling.
What I did
- Ran the in-person brand kick-off with founders Jessica Ince and Dickie Cohen in June 2020
- Wrote the strategy: vision, mission, values, tone of voice, and two full customer personas, 'Victoria' and 'Nicola', mapped across demographics, lifestyle and shopping behaviour
- Explored two style directions, minimal and symbolic-boho-chic, then worked through roughly 70 logo iterations before the mandala/tree emblem was right
- Proposed and designed the provenance score, a per-product rating for ingredient distance, sourcing and environmental impact that gave the brand a claim customers could check
- Designed the packaging system and the web presence
- Wrote the brand copy
- Produced nine versions of the brand guidelines and several hundred social assets across the engagement
How it went
Sacred Space is a spiritual wellness brand selling candles, ritual packs and experiences built around provenance, intention and care. I joined founders Jessica Ince and Dickie Cohen in June 2020 for an in-person brand kick-off, and from there developed the strategy, positioning, visual identity, packaging and web design.
The brand sat where luxury gifting meets spiritual practice. It had to be premium enough to sit next to Aesop or Bamford, and personal enough to feel like it came from people who believed in what they were making. We explored two style directions, 'minimal' and 'symbolic-boho-chic', before settling on an identity built around a mandala/tree emblem. That took around 70 logo iterations.
The strategy covered vision, mission, values, tone of voice, and two full customer personas, 'Victoria' and 'Nicola', with their demographics, lifestyle and shopping habits mapped in depth.
My favourite decision was a 'provenance score' on every product, rating how far each ingredient had travelled, how it was sourced and its environmental impact. Few wellness brands commit to something that specific, and it gave Sacred Space a standard it could be held to.
What I'd do differently
This is the project I'd run differently. Roughly 70 logos, five or six moodboards, several hundred website changes, several hundred social assets, nine versions of the brand guidelines. Scope creep at every stage, and I let it happen.
What I'd change: spend far longer getting the client genuinely confident on the brief before starting. Over-communicate the steps involved in a launch rather than assuming they're understood. Produce fewer, more targeted assets. And spend real time defining what the website was for, rather than designing it and finding out.
The work stands up. The way I ran it is the part I've since fixed.