Unspoken Agreement designs Skinmetal with young men as co-founders — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Sun care targeted at young men typically follows a predictable path – either clinical warnings about UV damage or hyper-masculine posturing with dark bottles and aggressive typography. Skinmetal, an SPF and skincare brand founded by paediatrician and melanoma survivor Dr Wendy Sue Swanson, rejects both approaches entirely. Instead of designing for teenage boys, New York and Colorado-based Unspoken Agreement designed with them, building a brand where the target audience held genuine creative authority from the start.

The Foundry, as the group became known, wasn’t a traditional focus group convened for validation. These teenage boys – sons, friends of friends, young men – who wanted to participate, functioned as co-founders with decision-making power. Every major creative direction was pressure-tested through their feedback, with many attending presentations to give live responses. “If something didn’t resonate with them or if it felt try-hard or juvenile, it didn’t move forward,” explains Saxon Campbell and Robin Kannard, Co-founders of Unspoken Agreement. “These young men were serious and gave invaluable, thoughtful feedback into building this brand as one they could fully buy into.”

This collaborative process shaped an identity that balances industrial strength with emotional authenticity. The packaging, built around a predetermined tottle form, deliberately avoids the soft, cosmetic silhouettes that flood sun care shelves. “The Daily Metal tottle purposefully feels engineered, functional and almost tactical,” notes Campbell and Kannard. The brand pairs deep, tactical tones with cinematic imagery of young men outside, laughing and competing – mixing hard materials with softer moments to create what the studio describes as space for masculinity to be “real, expressive, and multidimensional.”

The custom wordmark carries a hidden detail that speaks to the brand’s deeper mission. The italicised letterforms subtly reveal the phrase ‘in me’ – an embedded reminder that protection extends beyond physical sunscreen. “What ultimately protects you isn’t just what sits on your skin, but the confidence and discipline you build within,” Campbell and Kannard explains. This typographic easter egg reflects how Swanson, with her background in paediatric medicine, wanted Skinmetal positioned around internal resilience rather than external threats.

The colour palette emerged from functional requirements rather than aesthetic preference alone. Limited to one Pantone for both product variants due to technical constraints, the green accent serves a practical purpose – distinguishing the standard Daily Metal Stealth from Daily Metal Green Stealth, a colour-correcting formula that reduces redness as it blends into skin. “Bringing in the green as an accent for secondary packaging and UI elements allows a visual distinction when shopping the product,” notes Robin Kannard, Co-founder of Unspoken Agreement. The dark, almost tactical base tones work alongside this functional green to create a palette that feels purposeful rather than decorative.

The website extends this approach, presenting educational content about UV damage through technical diagrams and simplified data that feels worth examining rather than preachy. “Teenage boys tune out of fear-based messaging and moral lectures,” Campbell and Kannard observes. “The moment a brand starts telling them what to do, they detach.” Rather than warnings and shock tactics, the team developed the ‘Strong Skin For’ campaign platform – pairing real-life scenarios with the tagline to create emotional relevance. Strong Skin For Makeouts. Strong Skin For Selfies. Strong Skin For the Big Game. “Rather than preaching cancer prevention, we built a narrative that celebrates possibility,” Kannard adds.

For Swanson, this positioning stems from both medical expertise and lived experience. Diagnosed with malignant melanoma in 2012, she recognised that fear-based health communications consistently fail to build lasting daily habits in young people. “While we know fear can be effective in creating quick clicks or short-term behaviour spikes, we also know that it fails miserably in building lasting daily habits,” she reflects. As a paediatrician rather than a dermatologist, her brief to the design team emphasised identity and personal development over product benefits. “We weren’t interested in feeding into tired views on masculinity and adolescence or chasing down insecurities with beauty promises.”

The name Skinmetal itself reflects this practical directness – layers of metal oxides (titanium dioxide and zinc oxide) sitting on skin to deflect harmful light. “We're marketing what it truly is,” Swanson explains. “This is about pushing limits and helping guys go beyond expectations while making sure they are equipped to do so safely by protecting their skin, their health, and their long-term well-being.” The industrial quality of the name mirrors the packaging design, transforming SPF from something to hide in a bathroom cabinet into an object worth displaying.

What surprised the design team most wasn’t that ‘The Foundry’ had valuable input, but how fundamentally their involvement reshaped the project’s ambition. “With her paediatric background, Skinmetal’s founder gave us incredible insight early in our conversations,” Campbell and Kannard recalls. “She emphasised the importance of honouring the boys we were designing for by recognising their capacity to be earnest, thoughtful and deeply aware.” The Foundry’s feedback shifted the brand’s emotional centre from protection to power, proving that young men don’t need brands speaking at them.

Skinmetal demonstrates what becomes possible when brands abandon the assumption that they know what people want and instead trust them to articulate it themselves. The resulting identity feels neither clinical nor performatively masculine, but genuinely reflective of the audience it serves – built not through market research and demographic targeting, but through honest collaboration with the people who’ll actually use it.