Sauna House
Sauna House is a place of community, where people come to sweat, to plunge, to relax, and take a moment of reprieve from the fast-paced existence of modern life.
Each moment here is what you make it; make a new friend in the heat of the sauna, hold hands with a lover in the rush of the plunge, or sip tea in silence, making peace with the melody of your own mind.
When I joined Sauna House, the brand identity was established. Clean, playful, and a little cheeky were the name of the game. My role was to expand it into a system that could support a growing franchise business across digital, campaigns, merch, and the customer experience.
As franchises opened, our identity blossomed, ushering in a new era for the Nordic Spa.
Building Awareness
To reintroduce Sauna House Massage, I developed the creative direction for a multi-channel launch campaign spanning organic social, paid advertising, email, and pre-sale marketing. The visual system established massage as a natural extension of the Sauna House ritual, using warm, editorial photography and a restrained palette to distinguish the service while remaining true to the brand.
The campaign educated guests, built anticipation, and drove pre-sale membership sales ahead of launch.
Even before the booking widget opened, the campaign generated $69,600 in sales through the availability of prelaunch memberships.
Seasonal Moments
To drive revenue during one of the bathhouse's slowest seasons, I developed the creative direction for Sauna House's annual High Summer Sale. The campaign introduced a brighter color palette drawn from tertiary brand colors, creating a distinct visual language that stood apart from previous promotions while remaining recognizably Sauna House.
I led the look and feel across organic social, email campaigns, marketing automations, web, and print, resulting in $238,500 in sales during the week-long promotion.
Merch, Made by Hand
The merch collection made parts of the bathhouse into wearables created to leave the bathhouse. Plant cuttings gathered from the spaces were scanned and vectorized for the tote, while the sweatshirt was hand-illustrated to map the ritual of moving through the contrast circuit. For the T-shirt, logos were hand-carved into stamps, inked, scanned, and rebuilt as a repeating pattern.
The water bottle takes a more abstract approach. Its hand-drawn pattern was inspired by the underside of a fossilized mushroom. It’s an organic form recalls mist, water, pathways, and flow. Across the collection, analog processes and natural references give each piece a tactile connection to the spaces and rituals that inspired it.
A New Era (in progress)
As my role at Sauna House evolved, so did my involvement in shaping the brand itself. What began as working within an established identity grew into an opportunity to reconsider how the brand looked, felt, and showed up as a whole.
The existing system had begun to feel sterile for an experience centered on warmth, ritual, and human connection. The new brand guide introduces a richer, more expressive world with more personality, history, and a sense of familiarity designed to honor the roots of the age old tradition, and to inspire those visiting to take it all in.
A New World
An earthy, mineral palette draws from fire, water, wood, stone, and smoke, while an oversized literary serif brings a sense of history and ceremony. Hand-drawn borders, waves, marks, and illustrations add texture and imperfection—balancing the old-world references with a clean, contemporary system.
Research
The new direction began by looking backward. Finnish folklore, archival texts, sauna traditions, and the natural elements of heat, water, wood, and stone became the foundation for a visual world that feels storied without feeling nostalgic.