Sally Beauty
How do you take Sally from “Your Beauty Supply Store” of 1964 to “Your Go-To Friend” in 2024 and beyond?
Opportunity
Sally launched as a beauty supply store in 1964 and needed to take a bold swing to stay relevant and top-of-mind as audiences evolved and younger generations emerged. The opportunity was beyond a simple design exercise.
Ask
Refresh and evolve the Sally Beauty brand and redesign the website to better resonate with today’s customer.
It would take truly understanding the audiences they overlooked for nearly a generation.
Strategic Vision
What might we uncover if we took the time to listen?
More than a hair type
Textured hair is more than just a hair type category, it is culture. This culture is deeply rooted in family, routines, and communities. It means Saturdays spent with multiple generations in a place, spending time, bonding, connecting.
Nostalgia that permeates
The evolution of beauty is often deeply generational – led by community exchanges and rooted in family from the earliest memories. There is a hint of magic in nostalgia that lays the foundation for brand affinity and trust that requires intentional TLC for it to flourish.
Process
Discovery & Immersion
What you don’t know, you learn. Through in-person workshops, 1:1 interviews, data mining, and open-book conversations – we uncovered what we didn’t know and blew open what we thought we knew.
User Research
To get us closer to our destination, we needed to speak to the people whose work this touches – our customers. What do they care about? Why is that important? In what ways do they not feel taken care of? We need to truly get into their mindsets and understand what was at the heart of what they want and need.
Cultural Insights
It’s sometimes easy for assumptions to become truth. This is what happens when thinkers and makers get caught in the never-ending wheel of deliverables, timelines, and business goals. What we forget is the work that makes ‘good work’ is when we take off the blinders and dig into the hard questions to better understand who our audience is and what it needs.
Build
We build from the foundations of a cross-functionally collaborative approach. From ideation to wires and concepts to strategic design and development – partnerships across crafts ensure the strategic vision does not get diluted or lost during the passing of the baton.
Outcome
Together, we developed a comprehensive body of work ranging from vision-driven messaging for leadership and the broader brand, to consumer-facing communications with a clear framework for when, how, and where that messaging should appear.
This foundation informed a visual design system that is both flexible and scalable – carrying the brand’s vision consistently across every touchpoint. We also defined the information architecture of the digital experience, including navigation and key user journeys across the website.
It’s a body of work that we are all very proud of with real impact to the communities Sally serves.
Nekospective x Instrument