How The Phoney Club gave CÎME a visual language rooted in softness — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

When Rotterdam-based creative studio The Phoney Club began working on CÎME’s rebrand, the Belgian skincare brand already had a strong connection to the Himalayas. Its formulations drew on rare alpine botanicals sourced at altitude, paired with cutting-edge Belgian science – the name itself is French for ‘peak.’ Even though that connection had always been about ingredients, The Phoney Club saw something else. High in the mountain valleys, women wear their years with pride. Laugh lines trace joy shared in community. Sun spots mark decades spent tending high-altitude gardens. From this observation, the studio developed what they call the ‘soft gaze’ – a lens on how women in the Himalayas relate to beauty, ritual and self-perception. That perspective became the philosophical foundation for the rebrand.

CÎME arrived at The Phoney Club with an established product range and a founding story rooted in discovery. Co-founders Anke De Boeck and Isabel Coppens had built the brand after Anke trekked through Nepal with her father, encountering rare alpine plants with remarkable properties. Coppens, whose sensitive skin had made her an expert in natural formulations, brought scientific rigour. With De Boeck’s father contributing over 30 years of experience in botanical extracts, the brand had always united Himalayan wisdom with Belgian laboratory science. The products were strong. The philosophy was clear. But the visual design hadn’t caught up. CÎME needed a rebrand that could carry its ambition across every touchpoint – packaging, web, campaign imagery and brand communications – without losing what already made it recognisable.

The ‘soft gaze’ philosophy translated into softness as a design principle. The logo received added weight and body, addressing the original letterforms’ tall, narrow proportions that had created visibility challenges and a sense of fragility. “It lacked presence,” Art Director & Designer Michèle van den Munckhof explains. “More than that, it lacked warmth. So we added weight, real body, to let the logo hold its ground without raising too much of its voice.” Corners were rounded throughout the mark – quite literally embodying the team’s guiding phrase, “soft edges, strong core.” One element was never in question: the mountain peak accent on the ‘Î.’ “That’s the soul of the mark, the clearest expression of where CÎME comes from, both literally and philosophically,” Creative Director Sanne de Wild notes. “We kept it, and refined it slightly towards a cleaner, more contemporary feel, but its presence was non-negotiable.”

The typographic system pairs Affairs from SM Foundry with Monument from Pangram Pangram, a deliberate contrast that mirrors the brand’s dual character. “Affairs carries the emotional register of the brand: the softness, the intimacy, the storytelling,” de Wild explains. “CÎME is a brand built on feeling, on the idea that skincare is a form of self-regard, not routine, and Affairs holds that quality in its letterforms.” Monument handles the functional side – ingredient transparency, eco-certification, sustainability messaging – with directness and clarity. Together they create a typographic voice that speaks with warmth and conviction.

The blur system that runs across CÎME’s packaging grew from one of the project’s central constraints: evolution, not revolution. CÎME’s previous packaging had carried all-over watercolour prints that were expressive but without navigational function. The Phoney Club’s task was to mature that language into something more refined and purposeful. Van den Munckhof developed a system of watercolour illustrations tied to each product’s key ingredients, then distilled a signature colour blur for the outer packaging from each illustration’s palette. “The blur isn’t decorative, it means something,” van den Munckhof explains. The result gives each product line its own distinct colour identity, creating instant shelf differentiation and intuitive navigation across the range. “Customers don’t need to read, they recognise,” de Wild adds. “’I always use the blue and yellow one.’ That kind of ownership is exactly what a well-built visual system should create.”

The watercolour illustrations on the inner tubes were deliberately preserved. Created by an illustrator who has worked with CÎME from the very beginning, they represent a thread of continuity the studio chose to protect. “Creating something beautiful from scratch is the easier task,” de Wild reflects. “The real challenge, and the real opportunity, is thinking strategically about what already makes a brand singular and writing a new chapter from there. What do you keep? What do you elevate? What do you let go?” For CÎME, the illustrations carried recognition, warmth and history. The Phoney Club’s role was to build a system around them that gave them a clearer purpose – pairing them with the blur language on the outer boxes so the two layers coexist with visible logic. A new signature hand soap bottle in frosted glass introduces a premium tactile dimension, built on a refill-based system that ties the brand’s sustainability values directly into its packaging experience.

For web design, The Phoney Club typically works with reference imagery early in the process to establish a visual direction before any pages are built, but CÎME had no budget for a new photoshoot. The existing photography didn’t align with the brand world they had constructed – the Himalayan origin, the botanicals and the soft gaze philosophy had no visual presence in what was available. “So we found another way,” de Wild explains. The studio had been experimenting with AI-generated imagery and pushed the technology further until they could create mountain landscapes, rare botanicals and a quality of light and stillness that felt true to the brand. “No flight to the Himalayas required,” de Wild adds. That process of solving CÎME’s imagery problem eventually gave rise to The Phoney Edit, the studio’s AI-driven visual content service – an unexpected outcome born from a practical constraint.

The soft gaze concept also shaped decisions beyond colour and form. De Wild sees its most tangible expression in how the brand shows up publicly – who appears in its imagery, who it chooses as collaborators, whose face it puts forward. “Is it the predictable cast of young, blonde, conventionally aspirational faces?” she asks. “Or does it show something more honest, more varied, more interesting? For us, that’s where the soft gaze becomes a real position rather than a pretty concept.” That work, she acknowledges, is ongoing, and represents the brand’s greatest opportunity to live its philosophy.

The studio also pushed beyond the brief, challenging the founders on packaging materials. If sustainability is genuinely central to CÎME’s philosophy, de Wild argued, what does that mean beyond recycled plastic? Refill systems, solid formats, a fundamentally different relationship between product and packaging – these were conversations The Phoney Club wanted to advance. “But a rebrand is a collaboration, not a manifesto,” de Wild reflects. “The brand has to be ready for the step you’re proposing, and the founders have to own it completely. We planted the seeds. Where CÎME takes that next is their chapter to write.”