Kane NY

Bold logo. Bold box. Bold claim.

Kane NY is the high-end skincare line of Dr. Michael Kane, the New York plastic surgeon. The line consists of two anti-aging products: Serum Savant and a primer. The brand arrived already strong (a confident package, a confident proposition, a confident founder) and what they needed was a creative direction and narrative that could carry that identity forward in a category full of clutter.

We took over their social media in October 2015. The brief, in our own words at the time: build the brand visually through colors and textures that exist in fine art and the natural world, and find new ways to talk about modern beauty.

Three columns. One canvas.

A two-product brand cannot run on product photos alone. So we stopped designing posts and started designing the grid. We composed Kane’s feed not as a series of individual images but as an ever-evolving canvas, played against Instagram’s three-column layout.

Color theory, contrast, geometric elements. Big, bright, three-picture spreads. The brand became the sum of its parts (each post a tile in a larger composition that any visitor could read at a glance).

Weekly hero rows. Dimensional design.

Each week the grid carried a hero row: a wide, three-tile composition built around a seasonal idea or product moment. We leaned into 3D and dimensional design, using gradients, surreal staging, and carefully composed product imagery to set the row apart from the surrounding feed.

Hero rows tied back to Kane’s brand pillars (visual, contour, radiance) and gave the calendar a rhythm: a deliberate punctuation every seven posts.

Four years on the shelf.

The system was the program. What lives on the platform today is the curated remainder, browsable the way the team browsed it. Filter, scope, pull a strip into a new artifact. The case study runs on the same vault every Workbench brand gets.

Original content, fall 2016.

For most of the year, the feed was held together by curation and original graphic design. But the program also produced original photography, including a directed series of photoshoots focused on the luxury of the brand alongside elements of natural beauty: skin, textural softness, the quiet weirdness of a body in close-up.

It was weird, natural, beautiful, and (in our notes from the time) pretty damn fun. Whoever wouldn’t want to fill a tub with milk and spray glitter everywhere.

Originals across the years.

The feed wasn't fed by stock. We made the photography that filled it (texture studies, place studies, product still-lifes, color studies) shoot after shoot, season after season, alongside the directed editorials.

Product still-lifes.

Two products. Endless ways to stage them. Surreal scale, patterned grounds, color theory, intentional weirdness — staged still-lifes that read at a glance and held the row when nothing else did.

The feed in motion.

A through-line across four years of posts: 2017 to 2020, sampled from the curated feed. The system that started as a hand-built grid kept producing well after the program was running on its own rails.

Partnerships in the beauty space.

Alongside the feed, we ran an influencer program: strategic partnerships with voices in beauty, wellness, and editorial fashion to position Kane NY as a major player in the skincare scene. The selection was small and editorial; every partner we briefed had to fit the visual standard the feed had already set.

Influencer content was held to the same compositional rules as our own posts. Nothing went into the grid that hadn’t earned its place.