REUNION creates the name and the identity for skincare brand Tome — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Tome Skincare is built on nearly a decade of research into Spongilla lacustris, a freshwater river sponge that has been used on skin for centuries. Dermata Therapeutics, Tome’s parent company, used the findings to develop the Foundational Treatment – the brand’s first product – a mask used once a week at home. Its hero ingredient is the sponge in powder form, which Tome calls Bioneedle. The product is on sale direct to consumers, while Tome is also building a channel for aestheticians and other skincare professionals alongside it. Los Angeles-based design and strategy studio REUNION was commissioned to create Tome’s identity for the launch.

Dermata Therapeutics began investigating the sponge in 2017. “We came to REUNION with the product, the research and a clear understanding of what made the technology unique, but very little else from a brand perspective,” Tome’s VP Marketing Kyra Peckaitis tells us. REUNION and Tome began with research into who would find the product most valuable, how those people approached skincare and what would make them add a treatment like it to a routine. From there, the remit took in the name, brand strategy, packaging, print, digital, films, advertising, website and physical pop-up experiences, across a partnership that ran for over a year.

Working from two convictions – routines can be simpler, and natural can be powerful – REUNION arrived at an idea it calls ‘ancestral innovation’ and named the brand Tome. “If you look across the vastness of the skincare space, products typically fall into one of two distinct categories: scientific to the point of cold and clinical, or natural, which leaves you questioning whether the product will even work,” REUNION’s CCO & Co-founder Thomas Wilder explains.

“When we were developing names for the company, Tome was always one of our favourites because of its meaning: a large, heavy and often scholarly or academic book. The fact that they have studied skincare and their key ingredient for over a decade, made the idea of a book as packaging a novel and natural fit,” he continues.

Shaped like a book, the outer box carries TOME on the spine and again on the front, with a small pale label in the top corner reading ‘Foundational Treatment with Bioneedle.’ The labelling comes from the kind used in archival research collections. “We wanted the outer book cloth and packaging to feel like it had been stowed away in libraries for centuries. Something that’s been waiting to be discovered,” Wilder details. Inside, a dish of powder is labelled ‘Bioneedle Spongilla Powder’ and a welcome card has the line ‘The oldest new thing in skincare.’ The identity’s typefaces are Sharp Type’s Sharp Serif and Dinamo’s ABC Repro.

At the foot of the spine, the numeral reads 001, denoting Tome’s first launch, so later products can take 002, 003 and on from there, in the manner of volumes of books. “After roughly 20 iterations – maybe 24, who’s counting? – seeing the colour, materials, textures and overall experience come together for the first time was incredibly emotional,” Peckaitis recalls of the packaging.

Wilder describes the sponge’s own colour as a striking vivid green. Spongilla lacustris shifts to a darker olive when it is underwater or dried, and the Bioneedle powder turns olive green once it is mixed into the Foundational Treatment. “Our thought was that Tome can own a green that’s inspired by the natural colour of the sponge, but also embrace the range of greens you experience while using the product,” he notes.

REUNION created a system of scientific illustration. “They were inspired by stippling illustrations used in scientific journals and books. These types of illustrations were originally used to accurately display textures and shading with nuance, and to showcase details without the harshness of other illustrative mediums. In our case, the dots mimic the natural qualities of the sea sponge and are a nod to what the spicules of the sea sponge do during a treatment: they open up small microchannels in your skin and pores,” Wilder explains. “We use the illustrations throughout the identity to tell stories about the science and innovation behind the product, especially when we are telling stories at the microscopic level where it would be difficult to communicate those ideas through photography.”

Mari Juliano shot the photography, pairing natural light with dark olive-green and yellowish tones to move it from studio shots through scientific details to an outdoor setting. Najeeb Tarazi directed the brand films, including one shot in a film studio. “We used the river to evoke a feeling of natural discovery, the library to create curiosity and a nod to the origin of the word Tome, and warm earthy olive-green ambient light with deep shadows and low contrast in the studio to express renewal,” Wilder adds.

REUNION describes the voice it created for Tome as plainspoken yet warm, which shows on the homepage through lines like ‘Renewal has many chapters.’ In the research that opened the project, REUNION kept hearing that people cannot decipher the language around skincare treatments, so the website answers that with an alphabetical index. “The index of ingredients not only helps educate consumers, but also harkens back to the inspiration for Tome’s name: a scholarly book,” Wilder concludes.