Half Magic Beauty worked with The Stable to develop and launch their new direct-to-consumer (DTC) website on Shopify Plus. The artistry-forward, Euphoria-inspired beauty brand needed an agency partner that would understand their distinct vision and design a site that would inspire creativity, all on a tight timeline.
Half Magic is an emerging beauty brand founded by Emmy Award-winning artist Donni Davy (best known for her work on HBO’s Euphoria), and offers vegan and cruelty-free products using intensely saturated pigments in bold mattes and multi-dimensional shimmers. Through thoughtfully designed packaging, the brand strives to use recycled and recyclable materials to reduce waste and embrace sustainability.
Our Brand + Content Studio Team joined forces with our User Experience Design Team to deliver on the client’s wishes for a “canvas-like” shopping experience that would allow the photography and content to really stand out. Leveraging the brand’s existing color palette and overall aesthetic, we set out to create a website that would leave space for imagination, while also inspiring creativity and uniqueness.
With a well-defined target market of Gen Z consumers, we started off with a brand audit and questionnaire that would help us understand Half Magic’s audience, while also conducting competitive research to better understand the beauty landscape. Next, we translated this research into designs that would thoughtfully capture and convert the Half Magic brand into a unique, shoppable webspace.
One of Half Magic’s goals was to highlight the inclusivity aspect of their brand. With a content strategy that beautifully illustrates this commitment to diversity through models of all shapes, colors, and ages, we set out to build a space where consumers can be unique and different, yet still feel a sense of belonging.
Although this was a net new brand, the combination of Donni Davy’s reputation and her ties to Euphoria made this a highly anticipated launch. As we worked to design and build a website that would live up to the standards of Half Magic’s fans, it was clear that Shopify would offer the perfect ecosystem to get the brand’s product line-up into the hands of its creative, tech-savvy, convenience-seeking Gen Z audience.
Half Magic wasn’t familiar with Shopify’s ecosystem partners, so our DTC Strategists played a leading role in helping them understand the possibilities and our recommendations. Together, we identified Klaviyo for email marketing and Loop for returns as the right partners to help the brand deliver a five-star customer experience.
Throughout the project, we partnered with Half Magic closely, acting as an extension of their team. It was imperative to the brand that the website be an area for discovery and creativity first, and selling products second; committing to this mindset from the beginning helped inform which modules and styles would be appropriate for the build, while tying everything back to the foundational element of discovery.
The new halfmagicbeauty.com is a beautiful, immersive Shopify storefront that brings to life the brand’s vision for creativity, expression, and imagination. We’re excited to continue this partnership as we transition Half Magic into an ongoing design and development retainer that will allow us to collaborate on future iterations of the website.