Brant Barbershop.
A brand and booking storefront for a Kingston barbershop: a wordmark, a howling-wolf mascot, and a Square site that handles live availability and payment without the cost of a custom build.
The Square storefront: live availability, booking and payment, on a platform the shop can maintain itself.
Visit the live siteGive the shop a face, then a place to book.
Brant needed two things a single-chair shop rarely gets together: an identity people remember, and a way to take bookings without a phone call. The identity came first. A "Brant" wordmark paired with a howling-wolf line, and a friendlier wolf mascot that could carry the shop across pins, stickers and social.
The booking side went onto Square rather than a custom build. Clients see live availability, book and pay online, and the shop gets a storefront it can actually maintain. Choosing a platform over something bespoke was the decision that mattered: it put a working system in the owner's hands at a price a small shop can justify, and left nothing for me to be called about later.
- The brief
- The site had to run without me. Brant's owner had no time or interest in maintaining a website, so anything that needed a designer to change it would have gone stale within a month of launch. The identity arrived with a constraint of its own: Brant is the name of the building complex the shop sits in, and that complex's crest is a wolf. The owner wanted to keep both. So the brand work was less about inventing a mark than about loosening an inherited one until it read as a barbershop in a university town.
- What I decided, and why
- Build the storefront on Square rather than commission a custom site. Booking and payment sit in one place, so there was no scheduler to wire up to a processor, and the owner can change his hours, prices and services himself without calling anyone. The cost was design control: on the free tier of a hosted builder, the layout, the type and the page structure are bounded by the template, and the wolf has to live inside someone else's shell instead of setting the tone. I took that trade because the alternative was not simply a different website, it was revamping the shop's entire system to suit one. A single-chair business does not need its operations rebuilt around a portfolio piece.
- Where it landed
- Around ten assets in all: the wordmark, the howling wolf and its friendlier counterpart, merch, and the storefront itself. The handover is the part that mattered. The owner keeps a busy chair, and because he sets his own availability, openings go live the moment he posts them and clients book into them at short notice instead of phoning to ask. The constraint that shaped the whole project, that it had to run without me, is the same thing that makes it useful to him.