MakeUp by Kirsty | Brand & Website Case Study
From a DIY site pulling the wrong clients to a premium brand built to book brides.
How brand strategy and a structured build repositioned a Gold Coast mobile makeup artist from budget bookings to bridal and event work.
- Client:Makeup by Kirsty
- Industry:Mobile makeup artist, bridal and event
- Service:Website Builds
- Website:See it live →
Where Kirsty was when I first spoke with her.
Kirsty is a seriously talented good makeup artist with a genuinely interesting story behind her. She holds a Bachelor of Performing and Screen Arts, she has spent years on stage as a singer and dancer, and she spent over a decade in the fitness industry helping people feel confident in their own skin. All of that feeds into how she does bridal and event makeup, soft, glowing, camera-ready, and completely tailored to the person in the chair. The talent was never in question.
Her website was. She was running a DIY Squarespace site that, in her own words, looked a bit preschool. There was no automation, no structured booking flow, an inconsistent backend, and branding that had never really been developed. She was doing everything manually, which she found very annoying, and she was only getting a couple of bookings through the actual website while hustling for the rest through Facebook groups and friends.
The deeper problem was who the site was attracting. Kirsty kept getting booked by clients who did not align with her, often younger, price-driven people looking for cheap makeup, when the work she actually wanted, and is brilliant at, is bridal and event. Her site looked like a hobby, so it drew hobby-budget enquiries. She wanted to charge properly, including for travel, and to look as polished online as her work looks in person.
What the Authority by Design process found.
The core insight was simple and it shaped everything: most makeup artist websites are galleries. They are a wall of pretty photos and a loved my glam caption, and they leave the visitor to work out the rest. That format quietly signals hobby, and it attracts price shoppers. Kirsty is not a hobby. She is a premium, bespoke service for one of the highest-stakes days in a person's life. So the whole strategy was to build her the structure and professionalism of a premium service business, not another gallery.
That meant repositioning her around bridal and event makeup as the hero offer, and writing every service page in the language her ideal client actually uses, not industry jargon. I positioned skin prep as a genuine through-line benefit rather than an afterthought, because that is what separates a lasting bridal look from a Tuesday one. And I gave her a real About page that tells her story, the performing arts, the years helping people feel confident, because in a high-trust purchase people book the person, not just the portfolio.
Then I built the machine underneath it. I designed a custom Webflow site with a structured enquiry intake that captures the date, location, service type and number of faces up front, so Kirsty stops fielding endless how much DMs and starts getting qualified enquiries. I set up Stripe for payments and TidyCal for booking, built SEO-optimised service pages for bridal and event work, and handled the full delivery from copy and CMS setup to DNS configuration and a blog strategy for ongoing search visibility. Every decision pointed at one outcome: attract the right clients, filter out the wrong ones, and support premium pricing.
What we delivered.
At launch, Makeup by Kirsty had gone from a DIY site that looked like a hobby to a considered, professional brand that matches the quality of her work. The new site leads with bridal and event makeup, tells Kirsty's real story, and makes booking a structured, guided experience instead of a manual back-and-forth.
Instead of a gallery that invites price shopping, the site is built to do a job: present her as the premium choice, answer the questions a bride actually has, capture qualified enquiries with the details she needs, and take payment and bookings without Kirsty touching a spreadsheet. It is the difference between a website that decorates a business and one that runs part of it.
