D2C eCommerce | Beauty and Skincare | UX Strategy | Design Systems
Outside In is a premium beauty brand in a competitive D2C market. Their core challenge was an online conversion problem. Customers were not confident enough to select the right foundation shade without seeing it in person, which was actively pushing people in-store over online.
I led this project as Design Lead alongside one supporting designer, staying hands-on throughout. My involvement covered discovery and user research, creative direction, design system build, and final delivery.
Post-launch the site delivered gross sales growth of 441% ($432K), orders up 498% and sessions up 503%. Returning customers grew 60%, suggesting the experience built genuine confidence with users well beyond the initial launch window.
We started with a visual audit of the brand, working from their new positioning strategy 'Experience Light'. This gave us a clear reference point for evaluating colour palettes, typographic choices, and what the visual language needed to do to support a shade-focused product.
Accessibility was a priority from day one. We worked through colour contrast tests and type treatments early, making sure the final system would hold up across skin tones and different screen environments before committing to any direction.
We reviewed key competitors and aspirational brands, looking at conversion funnels, layout ratios, copywriting tone and feature differentiation. One thing became clear quickly: most competitors were relying on small swatch elements that did not give users enough context to make a confident purchase decision. That became the opportunity we focused on.
The IA brief was focused. The site needed to convert a social media audience into buyers across three core products. Marketing was handled entirely off-platform, so the website had one job: take that traffic and turn it into sales.
We kept the sitemap lean: a visually immersive homepage, product collection pages, and a brand story page. Every page had a clear conversion purpose and nothing was included that did not serve it.
Alongside the IA work we spoke with 30+ existing customers to understand what was stopping people from buying online. The answer was consistent: shade selection. Users did not trust small swatches to accurately represent what a shade would look like on their skin, and in most cases that uncertainty was enough to send them in-store instead.
That finding shaped everything that came after. Shade selection stopped being a UI detail and became the central feature of the site.