When salons reach a milestone anniversary, owners often think about celebrating with an event that thanks loyal staff and clients. With a little planning though, the celebration itself provides a powerful marketing opportunity.

Two salon chains recently reached significant business anniversaries—Paris Parker, based in Hammond, Louisiana, celebrated its 25th anniversary while Juut Salonspas, with locations in Minnesota, Arizona and California, celebrated its 30th—and both companies hired Imaginal Marketing to help them celebrate the staff members who helped them get there, while getting some marketing mileage out of their efforts.

Juut reserved a special space on their website, Juut.com, where they told 30 individual stories, spotlighting and celebrating team members. The stories emphasized the salon’s mission of Daymaking (the art of consciously making someone’s day) by sharing how staff members strive to create special experiences for each guest and how they themselves have grown emotionally and professionally through these efforts.

As a collection on the website, the stories stand a strong cultural piece, but they also were shared separately as blogs and social media posts.

“We also wanted to look back at the journey that led to today’s Juut, and share the history with our team and guests in a visible way,” says Juut Owner David Wagner.

Wagner worked with the marketing company to develop a timeline of the origins and evolution of Juut. The team created 36” x 36” posters with a circular timeline that accented key events in the salon’s history and framed the posters for each of the salon's 11 location.

“We put the timeline in a visual blog post, emailed it to all of our guests and pulled specific points from the timeline to share as individual social media posts,” Wagner says. “This was a marketing effort that was more about morale and culture than about a return on investment, and it really paid off.”

Paris Parkeralso created a PR campaign that highlighted 25 relationships that made the company what it is today. Imaginal worked to interview the 25 different people and wrote a blog post about each one of them.

“The posts were shared to Facebook and Instagram, helping drive up our search engine placement and our social media engagement,” says Debra Neill Baker, owner of Paris Parker. “Our team and our guests loved reading the stories and seeing their friends highlighted. It was great for morale and it let our guests that even though we’re looking forward for fashion and trends, that we have deep roots.”

Paris Parker even found a way to recycle its marketing efforts to create a one-of-a-kind gift of appreciation for team members in honor of their anniversary. As part of its 25th anniversary campaign, the salon had purchased billboard space in high-traffic areas throughout New Orleans. . When it was time for the billboards to come down, the salon stayed true to its environmental conservation mission, and found a way to upcycle the billboard material.

“We worked with Rareform, a California-based company that was featured on SharkTank,” says Neill Baker. “They created makeup bags by cutting the vinyl into pouches, adding zippers and a logo and including a tag explaining the origin of the materials.”

The whole project cost about $2,400--a little less than $8 each--and created enough bags to share with the whole team across nine locations and the corporate office.

Both salons pick up 2017 STAMP awards for the milestone marketing programs.