I owned product design for a mobile-first digital product passport for skincare retail, built at Telematic and pitched to retailers in Korea and France. It began as a compliance play and pivoted into a marketing-led transparency platform when skincare's mandatory DPP timeline slipped.
Overview
We shipped an MVP and piloted it with skincare brands. It paired a consumer passport, opened by QR or barcode scan, with a brand console for product data, traceability, content, pricing tiers, and analytics.
The core challenge: make fragmented, technical, multilingual skincare info understandable at the shelf, while giving brands a scalable way to manage it.
Product Designer
Role
Consumer + Console
Surfaces
KR · FR
Pilots
The problem
Skincare info is dense, technical, and hard to trust, made worse by language barriers and unclear certifications. For shoppers with acne, allergies, or sensitivities, choosing well is genuinely hard.
It started from a real moment: a parent couldn't figure out which acne product to buy for his daughter, or why. Add counterfeits and inconsistent data, and trust breaks down.
"How might we turn a compliance product into a transparency platform that creates value before regulation forces adoption?"
What I owned
I led design across both sides of the platform, plus research and retailer-facing pitches.
Consumer product
Scan entry, product passport, ingredients, certifications, usage, AI assistant, upsell and checkout routing.
Brand console
Product imports, PIM structure, QR generation, traceability, tier access, and modular passport content.
Design system
Reusable patterns shared across the consumer and business-facing experiences.
Research & GTM
Consumer research, stakeholder discovery, and product pitches with retailers in Korea and France.
Pivot: from compliance to transparency
We bet that DPPs would become urgent for skincare. They didn't, fast enough. So we repositioned from a compliance-first passport to a marketing-led transparency platform.
Brands still had reasons to adopt early: product education, authenticity, customer trust, and richer post-scan engagement, backed by a monetization layer of affiliate recommendations, checkout routing, and coupons.
Tradeoff
Compliance creates urgency; transparency has to earn it. The more commercial the passport got, the harder we had to work to keep it from feeling like an upsell surface.
Designed for the shelf
The real moment was in-store, mid-decision, often in a second language. A desktop layout or a wall of label data would both miss it.
We designed mobile-first around scanning, and structured content into scannable blocks: overview, ingredients, certifications, usage, authenticity, and recommendations. The goal wasn't more data, it was the right data, organized.
"We designed for one hand on a basket, one second to decide."
LUX: an AI explanation layer
Static content can't answer everything, so we built LUX, an assistant that explains products in plain language, grounded in brand-provided data.
The tradeoff was accuracy. Quality improved once we moved from an in-house approach to an OpenAI-powered setup, but an explanation layer for skincare cannot guess, so grounding and edge-case review stayed essential.
Scoped for reality
QR is great for brand storytelling but hard to get onto packaging; barcodes are everywhere but feel less branded. Deep retailer integration needs capacity a startup rarely has.
So we tested both entry points by region and focused on pilots, console, and lightweight integrations over deep retailer plumbing, keeping the MVP shippable and able to prove value first.
Tradeoff
Staying lightweight limited reach short-term, but it kept the product real, shippable, and honest about what we could deliver.
