Rayna
Project Type: Full Build
Company Stage: Startup
Deliverables: Brand Identity, Product Design, Engineering, GTM Campaign
THE PROJECT
Rayna is a community-driven beauty platform where users rank, review, and discover products—together.
Built for Gen Z and young Millennials, Rayna flips the script on influencer marketing by making authentic, peer-to-peer recommendations the core of beauty discovery.
The Challenge
Beauty discovery has become a chaotic, disjointed experience filled with incentivized reviews.
Shoppers bounce between TikTok trends, Sephora reviews, and endless influencer “hauls,” but trust is eroding. Influencer content often feels paid, filtered, and disconnected from real user experiences. Meanwhile, beauty lovers—especially Gen Z—are craving authenticity and the ability to see what their actual friends used and loved.
The problem: There is no single destination that unifies beauty rankings, honest reviews, and community connection in one place.
Founder, Michelle Anderson, is setting out to fix that.
The Solution
Rayna transforms beauty discovery into a social ritual:
Rank what you’ve tried, from “flop” to “11/10 no notes.”
Discover new products through the people you trust most: friends, classmates, coworkers, mutuals.
Gossip about beauty in a space that feels like your group chat, not a sponsored feed.
Instead of chasing viral hype, Rayna rewards authenticity. Every review, rank, and list helps others make better beauty decisions, while giving users the satisfaction of curating their own “holy grail” collections.
The Approach
Brand Positioning
We defined Rayna as “beauty’s inner circle,” a place where taste, trust, and tea come together. The voice is opinionated but warm, with copy that feels like it came from your beauty-obsessed best friend.
Product Design
MVP Features: Product ranking (-1 to 11), reviews, social profiles, and friend activity feeds.
Community-first UX: Clear, pithy microcopy and intuitive ranking interactions to make contributing fun and low-friction.
Programmatic Product Library: 25K+ beauty products seeded from Sephora and Amazon to kickstart discovery.
Audience
Primary: Beauty-obsessed Gen Z and young Millennials (13–26) who value peer opinions over influencers.
Psychographic: Skeptical of paid sponsorships, eager to find under-the-radar products, and proud to share their top picks.
Visual Identity
Color Palette: Cherry Red, Ballet Pink, and Cream Top for a bold yet playful feel.
Typography: Luxe Instrument Serif headlines paired with confident Neue Haas Grotesk body type.
Photography: Candid, high-contrast, inclusive beauty shots with an emphasis on texture and personality.
MY ROLE
I led the product from concept to launch, covering every layer of the build, in tight collaboration with the founder, Michelle Anderson:
Market & Audience Research — Identified the white space for a peer-driven beauty app in a saturated influencer economy.
Brand Strategy & Positioning — Developed Rayna’s identity as “beauty’s inner circle,” defining voice, tone, and visual language.
UX/UI Design — Designed the full product experience, from onboarding flows and ranking interactions to notification systems.
Product Management — Wrote feature specs, managed the dev team, QA tested every build, and oversaw category taxonomy for 25K+ seeded products.
Technical Integration — Coordinated scraping, data normalization, analytics setup, and affiliate program integration.
Launch Marketing — Created pre-launch campaigns, press materials, and social media content to seed community growth.
RESULTS
Community Seeding: Early access testers ranked hundreds of products, sparking active discussions.
Brand Love: Feedback consistently highlighted how refreshing it felt to get beauty recs without sponsored pressure.
Social Momentum: Early Instagram and TikTok content drove sign-ups ahead of public launch, leveraging humor and “de-influencing” trends.
