Meet the business
Sircuit® Skin is not your average skincare brand (it’s been proving that for two decades). Breakthrough ingredient technologies meet plant-based formulas. Think; Paraben free, shamelessly performance-driven and priced to challenge the department store giants at their own boujee counters. The philosophy underneath is the refreshing part… skin comes in every age, gender, tone and temperament and Sircuit builds for the one constant we all share. We’re all human, we all have skin cells (Science can work with that).
The moment
When we met Sarah Midgley, she was running the brand’s Australian arm. She reached out to tighten what surrounded the relaunch into Australia’s market, the branding, with a presence as cool-as-a-cucumber as the product technology, showing up as Australia’s hottest skincare fuelled by green technology.
Zooming out, the fuller picture had more moving parts. Sarah Midgley was a total visionary with game-changing plans for the cosmeceutical and skin industry and what she needed was someone to organise that vision into a brand and express it across every touchpoint (first up, we needed to establish what those touchpoints actually were). Because this two-decade brand had arrived in her care with no formal style guidelines and not much marketing or sales collateral at all, a brand with everything except an operating manual.
What was really going on
Here’s what made this one rare, Sarah Midgley was deeply passionate about a brand she didn’t create. Sircuit was the life’s work of its founder, Michael and Sarah was carrying it… first as the Australian ambassador, later as something much bigger. The work had to protect his legacy and make room for her to own it, both at full strength, neither at the other’s expense.
The logo held the legacy, but everything around it had to hold the future. So the bravest call in the file was the one we made… the logo (brand face) stayed untouched and the entire world around it got built. What existed read as cute, whereas the direction Sarah was heading needed modern, futuristic, sexy science (technology you can feel through the screen).
Sircuit came to Bloom off the back of the Australian relaunch and stayed four years. Where some engagements are a project, this one was a partnership and it blossomed beautifully into one of the wildest growth stories in this case study.
The discovery
We found a brand ethos already worth building on; backed by science, innovation, integrity and human. Brand feels to match; professional, cutting-edge, fun, results-driven. The tension between those lists is the whole personality… serious chemistry that refuses to take itself seriously, results you can measure delivered with a wink you can feel.
In our discovery, we found that the product technology was years ahead of the brand presence. A beautiful gap with the job to close that distance… to make the outside as cutting-edge as the inside, across touchpoints that first had to be found, mapped and built.
Behind the name
Nobody renamed anything… the untangling was the work. Three names shared the stage: Dream Aesthetics (the parent company and distributor across Australia and New Zealand), Sircuit® Skin, (the brand the world meets) and Sircuit® Cosmeceuticals (the company behind it). Which name wears which logo, where and when, had never been formally settled, so we settled it. A brand family where everyone knows their place is a brand family that can scale and scale was very much on the calendar.
Behind the look
The palette and font system came first, the ultimate consistency layer for a brand that had been improvising its own look one graphic at a time.
Then the supporting graphics gave Sircuit its extra oomph and this is where all the fun lives. Hand-drawn illustrations and elements, collage clouds, bubbles… full Y2K energy, so hot right now, and chosen with a straight face, because the era’s playfulness is precisely the right wrapper for serious science that refuses to be boring. The elevation ran from cute to modern, futuristic and unapologetically sexy science and the logo watched the whole transformation happen around it without moving a pixel. That was the point.
The system
Colour and font palette for the ultimate consistency
A suite of supporting graphics
Hand-drawn illustrations and elements, collage clouds, bubbles and the full Y2K kit. Later this evolved into futuristic imagery and monochrome with a touch of iridescent light.
Visual style guidelines
The brand’s first formal application rules, so consistency could survive any hand it landed in.
Social Media Canva Template suite
Glow up of the existing professional manuals
Ongoing creative direction and design across the whole touchpoint map
Social graphics, email newsletters, seasonal campaign assets (flyers, banners, shelf talkers, postcards, posters), treatment aftercare and prescription cards, treatment menus, event and product displays, website banners and ecommerce graphics, seasonal merchandise, packaging design, product graphics, external publication ads and internal business documents.
The brand partners platform (Skin Tech Academy by Dream Aesthetics)
Housing education, resources, onboarding and ordering for stockists… the thinking, the systems and the build, on circle.so
The brand family untangled
Which logo represents Dream Aesthetics, Sircuit® Skin and Sircuit® Cosmeceuticals, where and when.
"Thank you so much for our partnership over the last few years, it was such a pleasure partnering with you and I appreciate everything you created, helped me with, your designs, professionalism, patience and friendship. You were such a joy to work with."
The outcomes
The four-year arc speaks first. Within 12 months of working together, Sircuit branched into New Zealand. By year three, Sarah Midgley and her husband Tyrone put in an offer to head office in the USA, to purchase the entire company, globally. She moved her family part-time to the US and now runs the brand she once distributed. Watching a client grow from custodian to global owner is about as bloominous as transformations get.
Against the six benchmarks:
The brand family formally settled and the first style guidelines in the brand’s two-decade history, so every logo, colour and graphic finally answers to one system.
PRO/brand partners (stockists) grew by 30% in the time we worked together.
The feeling that the brand finally represents the premium price point.
Stockist ordering moved from email threads to an online ordering system, with onboarding and induction streamlined and a US-facing B2C storefront brought into the fold.
Footprint firmly established and brand recognition across both Australia and New Zealand grew 50% in the time we worked together.
She arrived as the Australian custodian of someone else’s brand. She now owns it, everywhere it exists.
The season now
Sarah Midgley runs Sircuit across Australia, New Zealand and the United States, full Charlie’s Angels (2000) energy, except she’s every Angel and also Charlie. The visionary plans for the cosmeceutical industry keep coming, and the brand world built around Michael’s legacy is finally the kind that can keep up with her.
If you’re carrying a brand you love but don’t yet fully own, on paper or in presence, a groundwork call is where that changes. 🌻