Fenty, Rare, Rhode and KKW: What the Packaging Was Saying All Along

Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 with forty foundation shades and is reported to generate over 600 million dollars a year. Kylie Jenner sold 51 per cent of Kylie Cosmetics to Coty for 600 million dollars in January 2020. KKW Beauty, with one of the largest personal audiences in the world behind it, stalled.

Every one of these brands started with an advantage no ordinary founder has. What separates them afterwards is visible in the packaging, because packaging is where a brand either states a reason to exist or admits it does not have one.

Fenty: packaging that matches a thesis

Fenty's argument was that the industry ignored women of colour, and that this was a very large commercial gap rather than a moral footnote. The packaging follows from it. Hexagonal, matte, dark, industrial, and deliberately not pink. It reads as equipment rather than decoration, which suits a range built to be complete rather than aspirational.

The design does one hard thing well. Forty shades in identical packs would look like a wall of sameness. Fenty solved it with a consistent silhouette and disciplined labelling, so the range reads as one system with many options rather than many products that happen to share a logo.

Rare Beauty: packaging designed around one hand

Rare Beauty's components are asymmetric and rounded, sized to be opened one-handed. That came from a stated position about accessibility, and it is the sort of decision that cannot be added later because it changes the mould.

It also created accidental recognisability. The teardrop blush bottle is identifiable in a video at arm's length, which is worth more than any amount of logo placement in a category sold through short video.

Rhode: restriction as the whole identity

Rhode ships very few products in a near-monochrome palette with one typeface and almost no ornament. The peptide lip treatment is a plain tube with a name on it.

Restriction of that severity is a bet. It only works when the range stays small, because the design has no vocabulary for a fortieth product. That is a feature rather than an oversight: it forces the brand to stay in the position it started in.

KKW and Kylie: what happens when the pack has no argument

KKW Beauty's packaging was competent, neutral and close to unattributable. Nude, minimal, and similar enough to a dozen other launches that removing the name would leave nothing identifying behind.

That is the visible symptom of the underlying problem. Fame gets a customer to try something once. It does not make them buy it again, and a pack that makes no argument gives them no reason to. Kylie Cosmetics ran into a related version after the Coty sale: quality complaints, a move into wider retail that cost the sense of scarcity, and visibly less founder involvement.

The pattern, stated plainly

• Packaging that follows from a stated position ages well. Packaging chosen because it looks premium ages into anonymity.
• A recognisable silhouette beats a recognisable logo, because video and thumbnails destroy small type and leave shapes intact.
• A design system has to know what it does when the range triples. Fenty's does. A minimal system usually does not, which is a reason to keep the range small rather than a reason to avoid minimalism.
• The founder's continued involvement shows up in the packaging first. Ranges drift into generic when nobody with an opinion is signing off on the moulds.

None of this needs a celebrity budget. A small brand can hold a silhouette, refuse a trend and keep a range short, and those are the three things doing most of the work above.