The Parlour
Twenty-Two Years as One Salon's Only Creative Partner
The SERVICES
Brand Strategy · Brand Architecture · Visual Identity · Web Design & Development · Print & Collateral · Social Media · Recruitment Marketing · Email Marketing · Merchandise · Ongoing Brand Management · SEO
The Partnership
Produced through a long-running, in-house-style partnership.
INDUSTRY
Salon / Professional Beauty
The STORY
Some relationships you measure in projects. This one I measure in decades. The Parlour is a premium hair salon with locations across Colorado, and I have been their sole creative and marketing partner since 2004. Twenty-two years.
When we started, The Parlour already had a strong reputation and an existing logo, but the visual brand did not match the room. They looked like their competitors instead of above them. The real liability was a website that could not hold its own against the sleek, sophisticated salons they were competing with for two things that matter most in this business: premium clients, and the top-tier stylists who attract them.
The Challenge
In professional beauty, your brand is your recruiting tool as much as your storefront. The best stylists want to work for a salon that looks like it is going somewhere, and premium clients want to spend their money somewhere that feels worth it. Looking dated is not a cosmetic problem in this industry, it is a business problem. The challenge over two decades has been the same one, renewed again and again: keep The Parlour looking current in a field where nothing ages faster than last year’s aesthetic.
MY CONTRIBUTION
I have been The Parlour’s creative director for twenty-two years, which means I have done a little of everything and a lot of the important things. Reactive work when they needed it: business cards for new team members, website updates, recruitment collateral. Proactive strategy when the brand needed to move: website evolutions, ambassador programs that turned each location’s stylists into a social content engine, and the brand architecture work that let the company grow without losing itself.
The Work
It started in 2004 with the first website, built in Flash with animation and motion effects, the premium digital language of the moment. That first engagement also established a new color palette that felt modern, rich, and sophisticated, and we rolled it across every piece of print so the brand finally felt consistent from screen to hand.
Five website builds followed over twenty-two years, each one timed to a brand evolution so The Parlour never looked stale in a visually competitive industry. That cadence is the whole strategy: stay current, stay desirable, stay ahead of the competing salons in the communities.
The most interesting problem came in 2021. The Parlour had grown through partnership, with senior stylists investing in the brand and opening their own locations alongside owner Gene. Each partner brought their own personality, shaped by the neighborhood they chose, and none of that individuality had ever shown up in the brand. So I built a modular brand architecture to solve it. The core system was refreshed with a new black-and-gold palette and updated typography designed to work as a neutral anchor with anything. Then, each partner location received two exclusive secondary colors and a secondary font, carried across the website and print collateral, including business cards, to sub-brand each location.
The result is the thing I am most proud of in this relationship. Every location is unmistakably The Parlour, with no risk of brand confusion, but each partner has a visual expression they can call their own. The brand stopped being something handed down and became something each partner had a personal stake in.
The Results
The Parlour grew from 4 locations to 9 over the course of this partnership and currently operates 7. But the number that actually tells the story is twenty-two. Twenty-two years as a single client’s only creative partner, with consistent year-over-year investment, is not a contract. It is trust that compounds. The work kept the brand desirable, the brand kept attracting clients and stylists, and the relationship kept earning its place. That is what a real creative partnership looks like when you give it time.
