Mary Kay

Mary Kay Canada sells through a national salesforce of independent beauty consultants. Those consultants also do the recruiting, usually one conversation at a time, over coffee or at a kitchen table. The company wanted a better way for them to show a potential recruit what the opportunity actually looks like.

Our answer was a Mary Kay iPad app design built for one device and one moment: a consultant sitting beside someone who is curious, swiping through the story together. We handled the UX/UI design and development of the app, which Mary Kay Canada put to work across its Canadian salesforce.

The brief was not to sell lipstick. It was to help a stranger picture herself running a business, and to give the consultant a calm, polished way to lead that conversation without a script.

The most important screen in the app asks a question instead of making a claim: Ready for your own business? Build it your way. Four portraits sit above four short quotes, from flexibility and a 24/7 plugged-in lifestyle to extra income for the family to helping other women feel beautiful. The recruit taps the one that sounds most like her.

Each choice opens a profile screen. One reads You are results-driven, with the motivations arranged in a circle of objects: a rose gold watch, a pink car, a piggy bank and a confident businesswoman. Tapping an object opens a small note card that explains how the business supports that motivation.

This was a deliberate choice about designing for the audience rather than the brand. People join a direct-selling company for very different reasons, and a recruit who sees her own reason reflected back is far more likely to keep listening. The same pop-up note pattern carries the eCatalog library and the Beauty that Counts cause-related program, so new content can slot in without a new layout.

Recruits often ask the practical question: what would I actually use day to day? The Your Business Tools chapter answers it with real screens. Stand-out Online shows the Mary Kay Personal Web Site as an online storefront that is open 24/7. App-solutely Current presents the company's own mobile apps on a tablet in a polka dot case. Communication Made Easy and the eCatalog library round it out.

Putting the tools inside the tool mattered. A recruit watching a consultant run her pitch from an iPad is already seeing the mobile, flexible business the copy describes. It is a small piece of storytelling through design that does more than any bullet list could.

The visual language had to feel unmistakably Mary Kay while staying quiet enough for long conversations. We worked in a soft pink field washed with translucent hearts, then saved a stronger coral for the pop-up backdrops and active tabs so they read as a different layer. Headlines are set in an elegant serif with italic accents, while section labels use a light, lowercase sans serif in pink.

Photography is framed as taped Polaroids throughout, including black-and-white archive shots of Mary Kay Ash, which gives a corporate history the warmth of a personal scrapbook. That same graphic design system carries from the splash screen to the last note card, so the app feels like one object in the consultant's hands. For more of our work with beauty brands, see our Oil of Olay packaging project.