L'oreal · Urban Decay Cosmetics · 2012-2013
I built the editorial infrastructure that let Urban Decay scale without breaking.
200+
Distributed teams
12
Countries
1 — THE CHALLENGE
The training wheels moment wasn't a campaign. It was a book.
Cult brands scale fast and break quietly. The energy that made Urban Decay magnetic — irreverent, insider, unapologetically itself — lived in the people closest to the founder. But as retail expanded globally, that energy had no infrastructure. Field teams were executing displays without context. Standards were slipping due to distance & lack of communication.
2 — THE APPROACH
The answer was bringing people in.
The design decision that changed everything was collaborative: every department contributed. Sales. PR. Marketing. The founder. It wasn't an instructional manual, it needed to be a cultural dispatch — the one place where the full brand, in all its voices, spoke to the people representing it on the floor.
Field teams stopped guessing what the brand meant. They started feeling like they were part of making it.
3 — THE WORK
From experiment to channel worth building around.
I designed and produced the Retail Marketing and Merchandising Book — a quarterly publication distributed worldwide. But the design decision that changed everything was collaborative: every department contributed. Sales. PR. Marketing. The founder. It stopped being an instructional manual and became a cultural dispatch — the one place where the full brand, in all its voices, spoke to the people representing it on the floor.
3 — WHAT THIS WORK TAUGHT ME
Brand integrity is a design constraint, not a creative one.
Urban Decay taught me that the discipline of holding a brand voice across every surface is a design problem, not a brand-marketing problem. It's about systems — naming conventions, decision frameworks, who has the call on which detail. The best brand voices break the moment they meet a checkout flow if no one's designed the seam. The work of holding the line is invisible when it's done well, which is exactly why so few people do it.
