One of the most popular hair salon franchises in North America, Great Clips boasts more than 4.400 locations in the US and Canada (as of 2021). The hear salons offer basic haircuts providing the customers with the chance to visit the hairdresser even in the evenings and weekends. The headquarters are in located Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Clean and effective – these qualities can describe the Great Clips logo at any point in its history. Such a visual identity reflects the brand’s approach to the services it provides.
What is Great Clips
Great Clips has been known as a hair salon franchise working in the United States and Canada. It all started in 1982 from a single hair salon not far from the University of Minnesota campus. Today, there are almost four and a half thousand locations across North America.
The first salon started working under the name Super Clips in Minneapolis in 1982. It focused on the needs of customers who had a hectic lifestyle and didn’t want to lose time and money on a haircut.
The original logo includes only the name of the brand in purple. The shape of the glyphs is utterly generic. It’s a minimalist sans, where the letters are formed by strokes of the same thickness. You must have seen such typefaces (or even this typeface) thousands of times in various places.
Moving on to the reasons behind this choice, we can suggest that the type fits the company’s business model. From its very first days, the brand has concentrated on no-frills, low-priced haircuts. The approach also suggested maximum convenience for the customers when choosing time and place. The typeface mirrors this concept with its utilitarian, functional glyphs.
Yet, a haircut is an essential part of your personal attractiveness, so the brand couldn’t go completely without a promise to make a contribution to the customers’ beauty, albeit a modest one. This promise was reflected in the choice of the color – anyway, purple is rarely seen in nature, so it is often perceived as the color of art, fantasy, creativity, and all things fashionable and outstanding.
The updated logo seems to convey a pretty similar message. Yet, it does it in a more refined and professional way.
The very shape of the glyphs speaks volumes of the brand. There are no serifs or any additional decorative elements – just the curves and bars needed to convey the meaning. This is what makes it similar to the old Great Clips logo.
And yet, the letters have an elegant and unique touch, especially if you compare them with the previous version. The impression of elegance comes from the sleek shape and a slight, barely noticeable, variation in the thickness of the strokes. The unique touch results from the unusual proportions, which are especially obvious in the case of the “G” and “C,” – they are slightly flatter than usual.
In other words, while the previous logo sent the “elegance” message through the choice of color, the updated one does it through the shape of the glyphs. This seems to be a more professional way as a specific color in the logo makes it harder to use on various backgrounds.
On the whole, we should acknowledge that the 2005 wordmark has more class and style than its predecessor, and, therefore, it does a better job.
The shape of the letters used for the name of the brand in the 2005 logo looks pretty much like typefaces from the Gill Sans family designed by Eric Gill. However, they have been customized to fit the style of the brand. Most notably, the glyphs have been flattened.
The simpler type used for the tagline appears similar to Basic Commercial Roman published by the Linotype type foundry.
In addition to the basic black-and-white version, there is also a Great Clips logo in white placed over the background in an unusual shade of green.