Skin is the human body’s largest organ while skincare is the fastest growing segment of the beauty industry. Yet with all their promises of ‘dewy’, ‘glowing’ and ‘blemish free’, most products on the market, are focused on the face.

Direct-to-consumer business Soft Services creates skincare products for specific body skin problems, such as acne, ingrown hairs, stretch marks and fungal issues. For founders Rebecca Zhou and Annie Kreighbaum (former Glossier power duo), it was important to address these concerns ‘thoughtfully and intentionally’ with research-backed ingredients and free online tools to support treatment routines.

Everybody and every body is different. And so, Decade – a small creative team based in New York – approached the packaging brief from a fresh perspective: ‘Instead of one big brand, Soft Services is a lot of little solutions. The brand identity was developed around the idea that each of these solutions deserved its own visual world.’ ‘Each product is a hero,’ says Grace Robinson-Leo, co-founder and creative director.

The brand premise, ‘everything can be different’, is more than skin deep, connecting to a business commitment to fully-integrated sustainability, a model that can scale responsibly. ‘We wanted to create a system of efficiencies so that we were not giving ourselves headaches trying to maintain uniformity,’ says Zhou, of the intentionally unique range of products. ‘I’ve seen situations where tens of thousands of units get scrapped because of colour matching issues.’

The result of this ‘elastic branding’ is an eclectic system of packaging components. The electric-blue Buffing Bar arrives in a grey box adorned with ‘a plump humanoid with smooth skin, riding a slippery dolphin’, the work of Taiwanese illustrator Lulu Lin. This mini-brand is many things – humble and flamboyant, contemporary and neo-classical, high-art and counter culture – weird, but ultimately beautiful.

The Clearing Clay, meanwhile, comes in a cloudy-beige tube made from post-consumer recycled materials: ‘There’s no way to get consistency when you’re using plastics that have had a life before, so we just embraced it,’ says Zhou. A vibrant orange S – for ‘sulphur’, which is the main ingredient – is heroed front of pack, complementing (rather than matching) Lin’s dolphin. It’s modern, minimal, geometric and covetable in its own right.

While the palette is diverse, adapting to fit the character of each formulation, it is united by a boldness that reflects the founders’ aspiration to build a brand that breaks down taboos, demystifying and destigmatising the less glamorous side of skincare. There is no space here for the shame or fear-marketing often associated with issues such as body acne, hair or odour. Why shouldn’t products for problem areas look good enough to live on the top shelf?

With everybody in mind, the choices of form and colour also blur the gendered line between ‘beauty’ and ‘grooming’. Unorthodox is inclusive, representing a critical cultural acknowledgment that the distinction between products for men and for women is a matter of marketing. Soft Services represents rejection of uniformity, perfection in inconsistency. Everything can be different.