Essence Cosmetics

Essence is one of the most successful new brands on the cosmetics market in the last few years. It offers an ideal range of beauty products for the modern girl or young woman who needs to be sure of having the right make-up in the right colors for every outfit and occasion. With essence, the cosnova GmbH presents the only color-cosmetic line to provide maximum beauty for a minimum price. In close cooperation with our partner Gerasch Communication, Darmstadt (Germany), we developed a new Internet platform for essence, which included a connected campaign website ("5 Happy Years") to celebrate the first five years of this most successful new arrival on the cosmetics scene.

To celebrate the fifth birthday of the essence brand, a new TYPO3-based website was conceived by Gerasch Communication, Darmstadt. The look and feel of the site clearly targets young teenage girls: there are AJAX chats, an e-card function, Flash games, competitions with great prizes and, of course, a whole bunch of tips and tricks. AOE media was entrusted with the design's conversion into TYPO3 and the attendant templating, both of which, at that time, represented milestones in programming, because this was a site with a considerable amount of Flash-driven content. For example, Flash animation was embedded over SWF objects and transparent PNG files created, which partially had to hover over these. The site received a Layout-Navigation with half transparent levels, which are cross-browser compatible. Furthermore, AOE media built the website to be multi-lingual, accessible in ten different languages. The particular challenge, however, was to express the extremely complex design in browser-compatible code, which when dealing with Flash, transparent PNG's and Alpha layers, resulted in one of the most demanding of all the XHTML projects in our experience.

Essence Cosmetics Homepage

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In sync with the website, a special campaign site was created to celebrate the first five years of the cosmetic industry's most successful newcomer: with the campaign "5 happy years" AOE media integrated customer fidelity features, such as online chats and various competitions and games – all of it as Flash-driven content. Registration functions were installed for the competitions and embedded into a voyage round the world with stops in five different countries. Visitors took a virtual trip to Sydney, Tokyo, New York, Ibiza and Africa. At each stop they could participate in activities and games, receive valuable makeup tips, win free cosmetics and more...