Renewing a clean beauty pioneer
Rahua was founded in 2008, years before the boom of direct-to-consumer brands that now crowd our Instagram feeds and the shelves at Sephora. They approached Saunter for a top-to-bottom brand revamp, to give their potent all-natural products a contemporary look and feel, while drawing attention to their unparalleled commitment to the people of the Amazon, where they’ve gone well beyond the typical give-back model to protect over 1,000,000 acres of rainforest.
We delivered a modern refresh that drew inspiration from historical botany textbooks, the age of exploration, and of course, the colors and textures of the Amazon rainforest. It’s a sophisticated and elegant brand system with a healthy dose of diversity and dynamism; we certainly did not feel that a standard minimalist look was appropriate for such a vivacious brand. It’s all wrapped under their new tagline: “a new understanding of natural beauty,” which represents both their bold vision of the future and their reverence toward the past.
Brand identity & logo
Packaging
Website
Art direction
Illustration
Campaign
Social
Rahua logo, 2025
Rahua logo, 2008
The new homepage offers a large, inset hero image that allows the Rahua team to celebrate a wider diversity of images, without having to worry about contrast or safe space for text. The enlarged logo overlaps the hero, but scales down into the navigation bar as the user scrolls. The entire page was built with flexibility in mind for marketing and merchandising, and the navigation was split into categories and intents, offering an easy path for both new and returning customers.
Elegant, expressive type plays a crucial role in the Rahua brand. On the web, headlines are set in Hoefler & Co.’s Fell Types Italic, itself a historical reproduction of the lettering that was originally cut around the year 1693. They are a faithful digital recreation of some of the earliest ‘modern’ English lettering — communicating the same reverence for tradition that the Rahua brand embodies.
To balance the expressive headlines, body copy and buttons are set in Messina Sans, a crisp and legible Swiss grotesk by Luzi Type.
We commissioned custom illustrations in the style of old botanical textbooks to represent the ingredients, diverging from the industry standard of high resolution macro photography. We felt that this presentation was more in line with the natural, small-batch essence of the brand, and brought warmth and texture into a digital medium that, all to common, feels cold and sterile despite designers’ best intentions.
Thanks for checking us out!
If you enjoyed the work we did for Rahua, we’d love to talk about how we can do something similar (or totally different) for your brand.