Case study · Skin Defence
A friend's skincare brand, built from the science up.
A friend of mine makes his own handmade skincare — a passion that came out of a difficult childhood. He wanted to scale past what his Shopify store could do, so we set out to build him a proper storefront around his big idea: letting customers understand what's in their skincare and build their own. I hand-crafted the whole thing, iconography and all, before the project was paused. This is the work so far.
01 — The founder
Where the brand came from
Skin Defence started with a friend of mine. He had Lyme disease as a child, and the skin conditions that came with it shaped a lot of his growing up. That turned into a genuine fascination with the science of skincare — he studied it for years and eventually started making his own handmade products.
He'd built a real little business off the back of it, selling across a Shopify store, eBay and Etsy. But he had bigger ambitions than an off-the-shelf shop could handle — and that's where he asked me to come in, on the website and the marketing, to help him scale it.
02 — The ambition
A store that teaches, and lets you build
His Shopify site couldn't do the thing he most wanted to do. The headline idea — Skin Defence's USP — was a create-your-own-productflow: educate people on what actually goes into their skincare, then let them custom-build their own from it. Paired with the fact that every product is handmade, that was the brand's whole identity: transparency and something genuinely personal.
A standard storefront doesn't do any of that, so we needed a custom build.
03 — What I built
Hand-crafted, end to end
I built this one by hand from the ground up — not just the code, but the design language too, including the custom iconography for the different skin types. Around the create-your-own centrepiece, the store gives customers a few ways in:
Create your own
The USP: learn what goes into a product, then custom-build your own — the feature his old store couldn't offer.
Shop by concern
Filter by what you're actually dealing with — acne, anti-aging, rosacea / sensitive skin.
Skin-type quiz
A quiz that reads your skin type — with its own hand-drawn icons — and recommends products that fit.
It's a Next.js / React + TypeScript front-end with a skincare blog and the full basket journey. I'd also started on the back end — the API and the customer-account side — to support all of it, deployed on Azure App Service.
04 — Status
On pause — but real
I'll be straight about this one: development has been on pause for a while, down to budgeting and shifting focus rather than anything to do with the work. I started it around three years ago and hand-crafted all of it, so I wanted to showcase what's there rather than hide it — the storefront, the create-your-own flow, the quiz and the iconography are all real, running on a QA environment.
Some of the work I'm most proud of, precisely because none of it came from a template.
Got an idea a template can't handle?
Happy to talk through the build — the create-your-own flow, the quiz, the custom design work, or how I'd approach scaling a brand past off-the-shelf.