Project Brief

Desert Sun is devoted to helping clients build confidence while enabling them to live their true authentic life. In order to visually represent their goals, Desert Sun wanted a look that could emulate and inspire clients across digital and print experiences at 50+ Washington area salons.

Research

We collected thousands of client profiles and used a third party company to analyze the information so that we could understand it in a more meaningful way. We then analyzed potential problems with the existing branding as it related to our clients—lack of trust, too sexual, unrelatable.

With our client data, we developed new brand personas that better aligned with our existing clientele and their needs so that we could begin to establish a fresh look.

Kelsey is a coffee barista & bartender who enjoys spending time with her friends, walking her dog skittles, and hiking on the weekends. She has a hippie-chic, eclectic style that is apparent in her wardrobe and her studio apartment in downtown Olympia. She doesn’t travel very much, but when she does it’s usually camping or to the beach.

Thom moved from SoCal. to complete his degree in Business from UW. He works for a local tech company and lives with his fiance in a townhouse in Ballard. He spends most of his free time at the gym unless it’s sunny, then he and his fiance take their paddle boards out onto Lake Wa. He loves spending time visiting his family and vacationing in Mexico.

Linda, originally from Florida, is retired from an aerospace company & lives in a wealthy neighborhood of Tacoma with her cat. She enjoys reading in the park, shopping in Seattle with her girlfriends, and visiting her adult children. She loves spending time throughout the year at a time-share she owns in Hawaii, where she can swim all day long.

Inspiration

We pulled together imagery that exuded the adventurous, sunny and confident messaging key to the Desert Sun lifestyle. We took inspiration from the fashion world through typography and layout, and from nature through texture and color palette.

The client did not want to develop a new logo, so we designed the updated look and feel with the existing mark in mind. We added key assets that emulated the adventurous, sunny and confident feeling built into the company values. To give variety and playfulness we added a diverse selection of both typography and color.

Colors (Secondary)

Process

Along-side the creative director we built a detailed style guide outlining how to use the assets and how to select new assets to give variety and freshness to the brand.

View Style Guide here.

Each month, salons receive new sales materials to display in their salon including: posters, counter mats, shelf signs, flyers, and window signs. Additionally, monthly campaigns would include direct mailers and some ad placements.

We created 100s of email campaigns throughout my time on the team—from first-time drip campaigns, to purchase drips for all services, anniversary and birthday, sales, new service alerts and educational emails.

We created a sitemap for the user flow on the website. To expand content offerings not available on the original sitemap we added in separate pages of content for each service as well as one for each of the different skincare product categories offered in salons.

In order to gain quick buy-in from the stakeholders and sales team team, we went directly into high-fidelity wireframes. We wanted to show how each of the different elements from the sitemap would interact, and the flow of information for the users from first visit to booking an appointment.

After developing the style guide, refreshing the digital experience, and creating a standard set of salon assets, we were able to put in place a system to create new designs easily and effectively. Success was measured through client feedback (positive), web traffic (increase MoM), sales (increase MoM), email collection (increase), and social engagement (increase).

Success with rebranding Desert Sun led to client requesting rebrand of Seattle Sun Tan.