Great Clips — Franchise Brand Campaigns

Franchise design is brand work with the hardest constraint attached: the identity is fixed at national level, the marketing has to run locally, and the person paying for it is a store owner who needs foot traffic this month. You are not designing a brand. You are making a national brand work on one street.

I supported three franchise locations as a freelance designer for close to five years, working through the Great Clips portal alongside the franchise owner and store managers. The portal is the constraint that shapes everything — approved assets, locked brand rules, defined formats — and the craft is in finding the room that exists inside it rather than fighting it.

The output was deliberately unglamorous and deliberately measurable: in-store signage, flyers, social ads and local newspaper advertising, all production-ready and all built to be reused across the three locations rather than remade each time. Campaign work tied directly to redemption and repeat visits, which meant the design either moved a number or it didn't.

It did. The campaign work contributed to a 57% first-quarter sales lift and a 45% gain in engagement.