Branding Made Beautiful

Beauty brand Mary Kay operates in over 35 countries. The company needed a way to promote global brand consistency and alignment while reducing design and technical debt. Frontify helped Mary Kay streamline the process and establish a source of truth to house brand and user interface design guidelines for the organization to work better, faster, and together.

Mary Kay uses Frontify since 2020

Brand Guidelines

Understanding the opportunity

Mary Kay Ash founded her beauty company in 1963 with one goal: to enrich women’s lives. 60 years later, that dream has blossomed into a multibillion-dollar direct sales company with millions of Independent Beauty Consultants in 35+ countries.

As a global leader in direct selling, Mary Kay realized it needed to streamline the way its internal users and third-party vendors could access digital brand assets and guidance. The organization also realized that designers and developers were spending time duplicating work by not having a centralized system to share what had already been created – not the smooth, efficient process they wanted.

In 2021, the urgency to address this challenge increased with Mary Kay’s launch of the Interactive Catalog—a critical tool for its global sales force. Collaborating closely with vendor-partner SheMedia, Mary Kay sought a streamlined approach to documenting their style guide and brand elements, ensuring swift access during Catalog creation.

Building a Streamlined Solution

Frontify provided a flexible portal where Mary Kay’s developers and designers could document and access the latest brand standards and elements, for use across all channels and digital touchpoints.

Their brand portal is called Honeycomb, and it became Mary Kay’s central design system for completed assets, helping to ensure brand consistency company wide. Honeycomb is the "go-to" place for any questions or needs related to creative and brand assets. It serves as a great way to maintain brand consistency.

The Honeycomb brand portal has four core sections:

Design and Usability Guidelines
Digital Icon Library
Design Tokens
User Interface (UI) Components

It also has resources for internal partners and vendors to learn more about the Mary Kay brand, voice, and messaging. Honeycomb has provided the more streamlined, easily accessible experience the Mary Kay team (and its partners) were looking for.

“Honeycomb is our "go-to" place for any questions or needs related to creative and brand assets. It serves as a great way to maintain brand consistency.”

Sarah Troy

Digital Experience Specialist

Embracing beautiful outcomes

Mary Kay worked with SheMedia to successfully launch its Interactive Catalog in November 2021 across 25 markets. The Frontify brand portal enabled SheMedia to efficiently leverage all the digital platforms and brand elements needed to build and launch the Catalog.

“Having access to the platform allowed SheMedia to quickly access the brand standards and share them with their internal teams, as questions and decisions were made in the Catalog's development process.”

Ada Restrepo

Digital Business Solutions Manager

In 2023, Mary Kay collaborated again with SheMedia to enhance the Catalog, striving to showcase a best-in-class user experience to the Independent Beauty Consultants and their customers. The team also sees opportunity in continued technological advancement, and seeks to further develop their brand portal, to deliver even more efficiency gains across the business in the near future.

The portal serves as a resource for developers and designers helping them ensure brand consistency while reducing technical and design debt over time. Additionally, it enables front-end developers, UX designers, and graphic designers to leverage its content fully while maintaining brand consistency across the organization.

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