Why Every Self-Care Business Needs a Brand Guide (and How to Create One)

Creating a consistent brand identity that your employees and third-party agencies can use.

What makes the biggest, most successful beauty businesses stand out from the crowd? The word “consistency” probably didn’t just spring to mind, but consistent messaging and imagery create a brand identity, which makes it easy for current and future clients to instantly recognize your business as they’re scrolling through their busy Instagram feed. 

We’ll walk you through what you need to know to create a document that contains all the elements your brand needs to stay consistent and amplify your image.

What is a brand guide?

According to Adobe, a brand guide is a “set of rules that define the overall look and feel of your brand.” 

Let’s pull back a little bit first. Your brand is made up of a bunch of different elements. There’s your logo, of course, but it’s so much more than that. Your brand is everything from the font you use on your website to the types of stock photos you prefer to the words you use in automated marketing campaigns or in posts on social media. All of these combine to evoke a feeling in people when they see any of the elements that make up your brand.

The brand guide, then, tells internal and external stakeholders what they should do to maintain brand consistency. It’s something you can hand to a third-party agency so they can hit the ground running, crafting messaging that aligns with your business, even if they don’t have an intimate knowledge of your brand’s history. It’s a set of rules that govern how your brand should be represented.

Take a look at examples on Google’s website to see how they explain what partners are allowed to do when using the company logo. Notice how they direct people to use the colors in the logo where possible, to avoid changing any elements of the logo, and maintain the appropriate spacing between each letter. The goal of this guide is to ensure that anyone who uses the logo does so in a way that anyone who sees it instantly recognizes it as Google’s. Your brand guide should do the same.

What goes into making a brand guide?

There are many ingredients that go into building a comprehensive brand guide, and yours should aim to include as much of this information as is relevant for your beauty business. These can generally be broken down into three distinct categories.

Visual elements

The look and feel of your brand is often one of the first interactions clients have, so these elements tend to get the most attention. These elements include:

• The logo: How should it be displayed? Do you have multiple versions of the logo for different use cases? Is monochromatic use allowed?

• The color palette: What colors define your business? What combinations of these colors are allowed? What are the names and hex codes so designers know exactly which colors they can use? Are designers able to use similar tones if the exact colors don’t fit well within the appropriate context?

• The typography: What font (or fonts) should be used? What sizes are appropriate? Is the font allowed to be bolded or italicized? 

• The images: Should images include families of all sizes and ages, or individuals? Are you projecting a feeling of luxury or accessibility with your stock photos? Do you want to use in-salon shots with real clients, or do you want to use professionally shot images with hired models?

Establishing these visual elements and the rules surrounding them up front will help you create a consistent and cohesive brand identity that is as instantly recognizable as Sephora’s Instagram page.

What your business is all about

Your brand guide should also include your beauty business’s mission statement, its vision, and its values. 

Chances are, you’ve already had a version of these written up for your business plan. Adding them to your brand guide keeps them top of mind for anyone crafting marketing messages, building new website pages, or otherwise creating materials for the brand. That way, you’ll always have your core values at the heart of your marketing efforts.

Personality and emotions

How do you want people to feel when they see or engage with your brand? Your brand guide can help you solidify that, too.

Include information on your desired client personas: who they are, what motivates them, and what would drive them to visit your self-care business. Likewise, include the voice you’ll use to speak to their needs, including the word choice, tone, energy, and emotions your text and email campaigns want to convey.

All of these elements combine to form the core of your brand guide. By including and then adhering to them, you can create a consistent identity for your brand, which makes future projects, decision-making processes, and growing business much easier.

4 steps on how to make a brand guide

So now you know what goes into creating a brand guide. Here’s how you can put it all together.

1. Brainstorm your brand identity and messaging

Start by sitting down and writing about what feelings you want your brand to convey. You may have internalized them or even said them out loud to others. Actually putting them into words inside an official document for use outside of your business will make you think deeply about what your brand means to you, what you want others to think about it, and how you want key stakeholders to help you achieve those goals. 

2. Gather your resources

Round up high-resolution images of your logos and any branded imagery. Pick the exact fonts and colors your brand uses, including their names and hex codes. Write down the ways you expect branding to be used and displayed — and how it shouldn’t. 

3. Break your brand guide down by content type and media

Make sure that your brand guide has a logical and organized structure. The most important branding elements should have their own pages. For example, visual elements like your logo, color palettes, and typography will likely include multiple examples and use cases, and will each need at least one page of their own. Then, you should break the rest of the guide down into sections about how you want elements to appear within different channels, like videos, photos, and web-specific content.

4. Pick a tool that will help you put it together

Platforms like Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, and Figma provide robust tools to help you build and design your brand guide document. These platforms will also allow you to save your finished document as a PDF file, which can be easily uploaded to your website or emailed to partners and press as needed. If you need a little help with inspiration or execution, prompt an AI platform like ChatGPT to make you a brand guide. Pick a platform you’re comfortable with, and make sure the final product looks clean and consistent — and don’t forget a final proofing pass for good measure!

Building a brand you can share

Remember: A brand guide isn’t just for your own use. It’s also for anyone who needs to engage with your brand, allowing you to drive consistency of your image even when you’re not in direct control. The more consistently you’re able to approach how the public perceives your self-care business’s brand, the more it will stand out within an increasingly crowded market. Start by building a cohesive brand guide and stick to it throughout all your marketing efforts — the rest will fall into place.