KYLIE BEAUTY // ECOMMERCE BRAND & SITE DESIGN / Design and Strategy Leadership

Scaling Kylie Jenner’s Brand

The Brief

Unify Kylie Jenner's beauty brands under one digital umbrella and launch internationally on Shopify Plus and Adobe AEM. Kylie Cosmetics, Kylie Skin, Kylie Baby, and whatever came next.

As VP and Executive Creative Director at Smith Commerce, I led the team that served as the creative hub connecting Coty's business stakeholders (chasing a billion-dollar growth target), Smith's technical team, and Kylie's brand organization led by Jen Cohen. Every deliverable had to satisfy all three simultaneously.

That's not design execution. That's creative diplomacy.

Not Just Customers, Fans

Kylie's customers aren't comparison shoppers. They're fans. I wrote the Experience Brief that became the project's strategic foundation, defining the design tone as "Intimate Glam" and establishing five experience pillars: brand independence, mobile-first, product confidence, intimacy over awareness, and first-to-buy achievability.

The hardest challenge was what happens when multiple brands share a stage. I framed it as a DJ problem: each product line is a different genre, jarring when played together. The UX needed a unified beat that Cosmetics, Skin, and Baby could adapt to, with enough breaks to absorb future lines.

Designing for an Audience of One

Kylie reviewed our work on her iPhone. So I built clickable prototypes for that context: mobile-first, thumb-friendly, designed to communicate at the speed someone scrolls through their life. When your stakeholder experiences the work the way the customer will, the gap between review and reality disappears.

The color challenge was where creative leadership mattered most. Kylie's palette leaned heavily on pastels. Pink everywhere. Beautiful, on-brand, and a WCAG compliance problem. I wasn't going to negotiate accessibility away, regardless of whose name is on the brand. Instead of one pink across everything, we developed distinctive palettes per sub-brand that honored Kylie's sensibility while hitting every contrast threshold. Distinct identities that felt like siblings, not clones.

Accessibility didn't limit the brand. It gave each brand its own identity.

The System

The Figma-based design system solved for something most eCommerce systems don't: a portfolio of brands sharing interaction patterns but needing distinct visual identities. I ran a design workshop where the team deconstructed core components, identifying what stays consistent (behavior, hierarchy, spatial rhythm) and what flexes (color, typography, photography, tone). Those rules became the system's architecture. Built for brands that didn't exist yet.

Working with a brand team orbiting multiple celebrity principals means the calendar bends to forces you can't predict. We built for it. Review milestones accommodated asynchronous feedback. Prototypes were self-explanatory. The process didn't depend on everyone being in the same room, because they never would be.

What This Work Reveals

The unified Kylie Beauty site launched spring 2021. International reach. ADA compliant. A design system flexible enough to absorb new brands without a redesign.

The skill that mattered most wasn't visual design or systems architecture. It was knowing when to hold firm and when to flex. Defending ADA compliance against a beloved brand color. Designing an approval process around principals whose lives are unpredictable by design. Those aren't skills you list on a resume. They're the ones that determine whether a project of this complexity actually ships.

Be the hub. Translate between worlds. Hold the line on what matters. Make the constraints into assets.