Secretos del Agua

The client

Secretos del Agua is a premium Spanish hair and skincare brand targeting both the end customer and the professional stylist and business owner.

For the former, they bring into the market a range of products designed to respect and restore the skin and hair natural balance and beauty.

For the latter, they develop training courses and methodologies to expand technical knowledge, improve business culture, boost customer satisfaction and increase profit.

The brief

One of the company's marketing strategies is rewarding its best clients with a gift at the end of every year.

As part of the in-house design team, my job was to design an all new appointment book to be handed out to each of its top 500 salons and beauty centres around Spain. It would help them book their customers in during 2019 and serve as inspiration for their teams.

Launch

November 2018

Starting point

The goal was to translate the brand's rich visual world into a physical object that could be handy in the salon and also become a staple as a marketing tool for the company. This was already being partially accomplished with a weekly planner, but every year the feedback was the same: the stylists loved it but they couldn't use it to manage their bookings. The gift wasn't as useful as it could be.

Working closely with the rest of the PR team and the CEO himself, some loose guidelines were drafted as to how the book show look and work. I then began gathering different elements from the brand's visual universe that would inform the design: images, design assets, quotes and other pieces of text and existing collateral to be used as reference.

Layout and size

For it to be functional, the book had to work in landscape mode, allowing the pages to be flipped all the way to stay open comfortably, with the team focusing on one page/day at at time. Each stylist would use one column, seeing at-a-glance all their appointments for that day and the type of job the customer was looking for.

The size would be an A3, with enough room for different people to be able to scribble notes on it and yet not become a clunky item that nobody used. Many salons, no matter how exclusive, are just a small room and barely count with any desk space.

A bit of context

I think it's important to know a little bit about Secretos del Agua to understand some of the elements that can be seen on the pages.

Since its creation, the company's has had two main goals: firstly, offer an alternative to traditional cosmetic and beauty treatments, focusing on repairing and restoring the hair and skin's natural health and beauty instead of covering defects, masking grey hair or merely changing customers' hair colour. Secondly, have a positive impact on society by transforming the organizations they work with, the salons that believe in their mission, elevating their trade, helping them transition from a cosmetic mindset to a health-focused one and showing them methodologies to boost customer satisfaction.

The path to achieve such a transformation often begins with a deep revision of the way in which the teams operate. Secretos del Agua invites them to revise how they carry their duties as individuals and as a team, to think differently, to be more present and aware of how we are all connected to each other, to nature and eventually to the cosmos.

A few elements carry this spiritual take onto the pages, following anthroposophic principles: the frames, featuring the colour of the star sign affecting the day and its name printed on the bottom right corner, and the elements on the header, featuring the day's planet, musical sound, colour, metal, cereal and tree at the top and an inspirational quote in the middle.

In summary

Developing this book, Secretos del Agua created the perfect vessel to convey year after year the key elements that shape its universe: the water as “the origin of life”, their values, based on how we are connected to the stars and to each other, and their mission, the path to find a deeper conciousness in what we do and how this can make a positive impact in the world.

Everything on the pages has a meaning: shapes, colours, words. All of them refer to concepts their clients recognize and are familiar with, serving as gentle reminders of the mission and ultimate purpose of this partnership.

Credits

Cover photo: Nicolás Loira.
Print and production: Edipack Gráfico.

What I did

Art direction. Curating the cover image, fonts, colours.
Design. Creating the layout and the final artwork.
Supplier liaison. Overseeing production and timeframes and handling quality control.

Appointment book 2019