L'Oréal

A newly crafted purpose, yet one that rings true for the 112 years L’Oréal has been championing beauty. With a portfolio of iconic brands, one of the world’s most powerful R&D centres and a presence across the globe, L’Oréal is a transformative and diverse beauty company.

L’Oréal takes pride in recruiting strong creative and entrepreneurial minds to drive their business. This results in a myriad of diverse identities throughout their different entities. In an increasingly seamless world, where one person can be a consumer or a candidate one day, then a colleague and advocate the next, L’Oréal recognised the necessity of having one strong voice across all departments and channels.

FutureBrand's challenge was to unify the teams’ visions and deliver an impactful, easily actionable corporate brand while leaving room for each team to express themselves. We needed to safeguard the diversity of L'Oréal's people while encapsulating the power and complexity of the purpose that unites them.

A vision of modern beauty transpired from the 30 interviews FutureBrand conducted, each one progressively more inclusive and diverse. We found the symbol of this inclusivity in the L’Oréal archives. The “O” from L’Oréal and the shape of the very first ad for the product that gave the company its name: L’Or de L’Oréal, released in 1908.

This strong personality was then reflected in the primary colours. A vibrant red was added to the customary black and white, making for a bold and contrasted palette, mirroring L’Oréal's passion and energy. Prestige oblige, the historic gold was maintained, more subtly but still consistently. Bespoke fonts were developed to capture the L’Oréal voices. On top of the traditional serif and sans serif typographic expressions, FutureBrand created a distinctive script font based on the founder Eugène Schueller’s own handwriting. A more contemporary look was strengthened through authenticity in the imagery used.

FutureBrand created a bold visual identity built on a sophisticated but fragile subtlety, belying its apparent simplicity. Timeless in its precise essentiality, diverse in its purity. So much so, stakeholders and employees alike were thrilled with the result which embodies the L’Oréal distinctiveness and universality. The new identity has met an unprecedented success, adopted and rolled out by all the L’Oréal Group’s entities and their most significant programs: L’Oréal University, FIT, Safe Together, Beauty Tech, Remote, Share & Care.

“FutureBrand brought a high level of finesse and intelligence into our collaboration aiming to harmonise the different Group guidelines. The creative result was so culturally on-point and graphically pleasing that it rapidly seduced the various corporate departments. We are very happy with this partnership, which has continued to grow with even more creativity since day one.” - Delphine Urbach, Image & Heritage Corporate Communication AVP – L’Oréal.