A single map of a scattered portfolio.
The portfolio was not the problem. The absence of a shared way of looking at the portfolio was.
The situation how the client experienced it.
The client acts simultaneously as a manufacturer, supplier, and retailer of cosmetic products, managing 30+ brands and ~100 collections. Because manufacturing sat inside the same building, launching a new brand had historically become easier than revising an existing one.
The portfolio grew purely by accumulation, resulting in massive operational friction:
Some brands looked identical with different products underneath.
Others looked completely different but sold the exact same range.
No single sales catalogue existed.
Every pitch meeting was built ad-hoc from different documents.
The entire organization relied on the memory of a single, long-standing team member to understand their own offering.
What I actually did.
The brief was to build a comprehensive visual reference of the full portfolio to surface duplicates and gaps.
The showroom visit: My first step was visiting the physical showroom to understand the problem spatially. Some brands were distinct; others completely blurred into each other on the shelf.
The literature audit: I requested every piece of sales literature ever produced. To diagnose the internal system, I needed to see exactly what the clients see.
The literature revealed the true diagnosis: no two documents were structured the same way. One led with product range, another with brand story, another with ingredients. Comparing brands like-for-like required massive mental translation, forcing the company to use a human brain as a filing cabinet.
The reference I built.
I mapped the intricate portfolio using three complementary layers of visual architecture:
Layer 1: The matrix. A complete grid of every brand against every product. This instantly surfaced the duplicates and gaps the organisation had long suspected but could never prove.
Layer 2: The multi-lens maps. A set of portfolio maps organised by distinct lenses: brand type (licensed vs. own), category (e.g. lifestyle, luxury), and origin (Europe, Asia, Americas). Every map utilised the exact same visual grammar so the team could scan them instantly without re-learning the format.
Layer 3: The information architecture template. A structured design template for future catalogue production. This ensured every brand—from shelf story to product spec—followed the exact same hierarchy, creating a single source of truth.
What changed after.
With the entire ecosystem mapped onto a shared document, the organisation could finally make strategic decisions:
Product optimisation: missing products were developed, dormant collections were discontinued, and forgotten brands were reintroduced to secure new orders.
Operational consolidation: a single internal team took ownership of the reference map, retiring parallel documents and eliminating the reliance on a single person's memory.
Strategic alignment: Meetings finally shifted away from arguing over which version of the portfolio was correct, and focused instead on upstream strategy.
What I learned.
A capability can quietly become a weakness.
The client's ability to manufacture entirely in-house was a massive competitive advantage. However, that same capability removed the natural friction that forces an organisation to structure its offering as it grows.
Whenever a team can produce faster than it can decide, the organisation eventually loses sight of what it actually sells. A shared visual reference is what puts the decision-making power back upstream of the production line.