The House of Prestige Beauty
Challenge
Estée Lauder Companies is a global leader in prestige beauty, stewarding a diverse portfolio of 20+ iconic brands distributed in over 150 countries and territories. With such breadth—across makeup, skin care, fragrance, and hair care—the company faced a classic enterprise creative dilemma: how to unify brand expression, digital content production, and consumer engagement without losing the unique identity of each label. Portfolio fragmentation, inconsistent systems, and increasing demand for digital assets at scale were impeding speed, coherence, and global relevance.
Strategy
The creative strategy was rooted in two enterprise imperatives:
Unify Creative Infrastructure Across Brands
Build a scalable creative ecosystem that could support ELC’s portfolio while allowing individual brands to maintain their distinct voices and cultural relevance.Accelerate Digital Content Velocity
Redesign creative processes to respond to the dramatic growth in content requirements driven by commerce, social, and mobile channels—without sacrificing creative quality or brand integrity.
This called for systems thinking, governance frameworks, and tooling modernization that could handle high volumes, global markets, and localized needs.
Execution
Execution centered on establishing enterprise-level creative systems and digital workflows, including:
Unified Asset Strategy: Developing modular asset architectures and governance principles that could serve 20+ brands in multiple categories and markets.
Cross-Platform Coherence: Aligning design systems and digital templates to ensure consistent brand expression on ecommerce, social, paid media, and mobile while accommodating localized cultural nuances.
Tooling Modernization: Enhancing digital asset management and collaboration platforms to improve searchability, deployment speed, and performance insights for creative teams.
The work was positioned as a transformation of creative infrastructure, by shifting from isolated campaign outputs to interconnected, scalable creative platforms.
Results
Enterprise Creative System Activation: A coordinated set of systems and workflows that support creative production across ELC’s global portfolio, reducing duplication and enabling faster delivery.
Brand-Coherent Digital Experiences: The new approach ensured that each ELC brand’s digital presence retained its unique aesthetic and cultural relevance while benefiting from enterprise governance and speed.
Cohesive Prestige Aesthetic Rebranding: A new logomark, digital experience, product photography, executive portraits, illustrations and video assets were created
My goal was to position Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) as a revered brand with an ownable visual identity that is distinct from the Estée Lauder brand. A step in achieving this was to create a new wordmark cut from a unique typeface that created a ode to the past while appearing modern and luxury.
I led the team that concepted, and produced original art: from the homepage intro video, career video interviews, elevated product photography of the entire catalog, corporate portraits and collaborated with Donald Roberston on illustration.
Still life photography was shot to reinforce the Estée Lauder Companies unique look and feel as a House of Prestige Beauty.
Executive Summary
The Estée Lauder Companies program exemplifies creative leadership at the enterprise scale—crafting systems that support a complex portfolio of brands without diluting their individual identities. By embedding intelligent infrastructure, and modular asset frameworks, the initiative improved creative velocity, global coherence, and brand fidelity across channels and markets. This transformation moved the organization from fragmented outputs toward a sustained, scalable creative ecosystem.
Team Credits: Jun Lu, Nikki Huffman, Jas Rewkiewicz, Rekishia Jessup
