Channel Shift
Clinique was the first cosmetics company to ‘go electronic.’ We worked directly with the executive staff led by Clinique’s President, Dan Brestle, to create a series of projects that helped Clinique pioneer the use of the interactive medium.

Our team flew often to New York City to meet with Clinique in their offices high above Central Park. The offices are beautiful, and ALL white- white walls, floors, leather couches, flowers. Nobody understands brand identity like Clinique.

We started with the block and tackle work-integrating all their existing material. Photos by Irving Penn, past print campaigns, product shots, and product descriptions all needed to be gathered together, put in consistent file formats, and integrated into one large data structure.

We showed the execs past projects and lots of prototypes, . They were a very savvy and intelligent group who inherently understood how the technology could serve their goals at Clinique. but they needed to understand what the new medium could do for them. In turn, they educated us about their business, their culture, and their process.

The 2 biggest design issues were 1) protect the Clinique brand so that it retained the same clean elegance that it was famous for and 2) create projects that would allow consumers to buy products directly from Clinique without alienating the stores that sold Clinique products. Clinique was one of the first major fashion manufacturers to migrate to the Web successfully. Channel shift was a major retailing issue in the 90s.

We began by creating a ‘Back to School’ campaign for incoming college freshman. This disk,, which let students order Clinique products by fax or by mail, was part of a student welcome kit at many U.S. universities, The next project was a CD for Clinique retailers that allowed shoppers to interact with the Clinique product line and to then purchase goods at the Clinique counter. Finally, a CD of the Clinique products was created and distributed for all Clinique customers. This CD served as the blueprint for the Clinique web site.

Many different people have worked on the web site since we designed it. It has changed in some ways (we never used purple in our design for example) but it still retains the structure and feeling of the original- designed in the 90s, Viewing this design, and then looking at today’s web site is a good design exercise. Always think of the life of a site after it launches. Because everything is changeable on the web, your goal is twofold_to make things easy to change and modify, and to make sure your site has strong design and engineering integrity so that the design structure will remain true over time.