Case study · Franchise
Print-collateral system for a 7-location franchise
Editable flyer, menu, postcard and signage templates locked to brand rules, each franchisee can swap photos and offers without breaking the system, and head office stays in control of what goes out the door.
The challenge
What we had to solve.
Every franchise location had been making its own print pieces, some with a local printer, some on Canva, some still using the original 2019 templates. The brand looked like 7 different businesses.
Head office had a brand guide, but no one read 40-page PDFs. What they needed was a system that made the right thing the easy thing, and the wrong thing impossible.
Our approach
How we tackled it.
We rebuilt the brand kit around constraints, not options. A franchisee gets to change four things on a flyer: the offer, the local address, the photo, the date. Everything else, logo placement, type, hierarchy, colour ratios, is locked.
Templates were built in Canva (because that's what the franchisees actually use) and in a designer-grade Adobe library (for head office's annual campaigns). Both pulled from the same brand tokens so nothing drifted.
We added an approval flow: any print piece going to a local printer needs to come from the template library and pass a one-click brand audit. Out-of-template pieces get flagged before they're produced.
Training was 45 minutes per franchise, once. The system was designed to need no second training session.
Deliverables
What we built.
Specific, named outputs, not vague "strategy".
Brand kitLogo, type, colour, photo direction, voice principles, all in one Notion-hosted hub.
Canva template libraryFlyers, menus, postcards, table tents, signage, locked, editable in four places.
Adobe master filesDesigner-grade source files for head-office campaigns, sharing the same brand tokens.
Approval workflowPre-print brand audit and approval log per location.
Onboarding video45-minute walkthrough for new franchisees, recorded once, reused forever.
Outcomes
What it returned.
- All 7 locations now produce on-brand print in a single day instead of waiting weeks for head office to design every piece.
- Head office redirected the time they used to spend fixing franchisee designs to growing the brand at a national level.
- Local printer relationships improved, printers now receive print-ready files first try, no back-and-forth.
- Two new locations onboarded after the rollout and were producing on-brand collateral within 48 hours of opening.
The takeaway
What we learned.
A brand guide that lives in a PDF doesn't live at all. A brand system that lives inside the tools your team already uses, with the right defaults and locked constraints, runs itself. The constraint is the gift.
Services used
How we got it done.
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