When it comes to DeBow Padgett’s success in the franchise marketing space — particularly with social media strategy — the numbers don’t lie. While supporting more than 300 locations with their social media for Painting With a Twist, she increased engagement rates across the brand’s channels by 7,400%.
When the parent company Twist Brands acquired paint your own pottery studio Color Me Mine in 2021, she was asked to work her magic there as the Director of Marketing and Creative, she has since increased the brand’s Instagram following 152% and Facebook following 42%, supporting their vision of growing from 150+ to 300 locations in the next five years (U.S. for now, but they’re exploring international opportunities for the future).
She oversees the strategy, infrastructure, and execution of all marketing initiatives supported by a national ad fund, has developed thousands of customizable templates for her franchisees, and has led trainings for new marketing tools that achieved a 90% adoption rate within 30 days. And she somehow does it all with enduring passion and while caring about the success of each individual franchise owner.
In our conversation, she dives into precisely the strategies that have helped her achieve this impressive growth.
You have increased Color Me Mine’s social following by an impressive amount since joining. What has been most effective in achieving that?
The biggest thing we did was help our franchises publish more content. I started providing very detailed content calendars with at least a post a day including everything from the graphic or short-form video to the caption.
We build these calendars out three months in advance and use SOCi to give them access and automate a lot of the process. So, right now, all of our franchise system has access to 450 posts to choose from up until the end of the year. They can scroll through a feed of every post in the social calendar with an option to discard or keep, and then they can hit schedule all.
So we have some franchisees that are scheduling all of their social media content within about 15-20 minutes for a whole quarter, which, before, would be an extremely laborious task that would require daily effort and cause a lot of anxiety.
“So we have some franchisees that are scheduling all of their social media content within about 15-20 minutes for a whole quarter….”
Color Me Mine social media calendar in SOCi
Having that proactive content made ahead of time gives us the ability to be reactive in our social content and hop on trends, which is important since we’re such a visual brand. For example, sardines are a huge trend right now, so we’ve launched a tin fish campaign featuring sardines and oysters, and caviar painted on plates.
Sardine campaign social assets
We stay on top of trends through a mix of organic research and creative curiosity. I spend a lot of time online, following what brands, creators, and influencers are doing across their social, retail, and lifestyle spaces. Platforms like Pinterest Predicts and other seasonal style guides help inform the long view.
But, honestly, a lot of it comes from being deeply engaged in what’s inspiring others in real time, from color palettes and iconography to cultural moments and design moods. I’m always searching for the next “cerulean sweater“, so I pay close attention to the little things that eventually shape everything.
We’ve also added more seasonality — for example, our guests now get excited to see the new seasonal pottery offerings that we launch throughout the year.
Summery seasonal offerings and a special Halloween project
I pulled the numbers from 2022 to 2023 after we launched those detailed content calendars, and the amount of engagement was millions higher. It’s definitely due to the fact that more content is going out, but it’s also due to the fact that the content is a little predictable for the audience. They know what the personality of the brand is, what to expect.
We also suggest our studio owners create their own content. We want to provide as much automation as we can to alleviate the burden of having a robust social presence, so we ask them to post as much as they want from the branded content calendar, but we also want them to tell their studio’s story. I feel it’s important for franchisees to create some of their own content because real people connect with real people. Polished branded content builds recognition and trust, but it’s the personal moments (actual staff, real bloopers, behind the scenes energy) that convert. It’s how we bridge the gap between being a “cute brand” and being the place you want to go to that weekend.
I would say most of our studios use about 70% branded content and 30% content that shows off their studio’s personality. We coach the 70/30 split for visual and strategic consistency. It’s been proven to be that sweet spot for both our online audiences and the owners themselves. For our audience, it maintains our identity as a brand while spotlighting specific communities, artists, and customer experiences.
For our owners, it alleviates some of the pressure of being a small business owner on social media. We’ve seen that studios that embrace that blend tend to have stronger engagement, higher reach, and, in many cases, better performance in both foot traffic and website traffic. Giving this freedom might feel like a risk to some brands, but when done with the right tools and guidance it becomes our brand advantage, not liability. Our most magnetic studios aren’t just posting, they’re storytelling, and that drives results!
We offer a lot of training around behind-the-scenes ideas and posting guest creations that highlight regionality (for example, California studios have a lot more beaches and sun imagery and then Minnesota is all forests and camping and lakes).
Posts from Color Me Mine Daly City in CA and Color Me Mine Maple Grove in MN
We’ve also shifted towards short-form video, both the curated, high-gloss campaigns and authentic moments from our studio owners. The daily life of a pottery studio owner is amazing: just opening the studio is content, glazing your guest pieces is content, unloading the kiln is a color explosion of content. We educate our franchisees on how to tap into that. Color Me Mine franchisees are unique in that the majority of them began their journey to ownership from an experience as a customer in a studio. They love what they do and are very active participants in the day to day. It shows in their content. It’s playful, relatable, and taps into the very essence of our brand: “The Art of Having Fun!”
There was a moment in 2024 when I saw multiple studios posting completely different content. Some were showing off their team members, others were posting work-in-progress painting videos, others leaning heavily into trends and humor, but in between all of that incredible personality, every post still felt unmistakably on-brand. That was the moment I thought, “they get it.” It wasn’t just about using the calendar. It was about understanding the brand voice, the vibe, and the creative freedom within it. Their feeds were bursting to life with localized content side by side with branded content packed with signature colorways and design cues that said, “We are Color Me Mine.” That kind of alignment is what builds real trust with guests and gives studios the confidence to show up online as themselves.
I think the biggest part of social media, however, is community engagement. While the creative itself is really important, because it has to be eye-catching and thumb-stopping, it’s really about connecting with the customers. We train our franchisees that they are going to reap what they sow on social media. If they expect businesses in their area and guests to engage with their posts, they need to expect that of themselves as well. We encourage them to spend time interacting on other brand’s pages and going to the pages of people who’ve painted in the studios and asking them questions or encouraging their creativity.
How do you ensure brand consistency?
We use Canva to lock in a brand kit and create templates. My whole theory on franchise marketing is make it plug and play, make it fully ready to use as is, but many elements within every template are fully editable so studios can add their own photos and change the text, but all within our branded font family and within our branded colors.
Canva also has templates for reels and stories: frames where you pop in something or a banner they can use to communicate the theme of the video. But they still leave a lot to the studio owner, and we want that raw, authentic content: moving a phone around and looking at all the beautiful pottery or mixing colors on a palette or even cleaning paint brushes and watching the rainbow of colors go down the sink.
These are the authentic things guests experience, so it translates well to video. Coming from someone who curates things almost to a fault, it’s nice to let go. I have to remind myself, “Hey, this might not look perfect, but it’s going to outperform some of the more curated content because it’s real.”
We don’t have any sort of approvals process for organic content created by our studios — we give them that trust to move through it using the tools we provide. And, if we notice something wrong, we use that as an opportunity to have a training conversation. Maybe they don’t know what’s out there or understand how to use what’s out there. So let’s get on a call and teach and listen and learn and find where maybe we have gaps in training, because we’re always improving, especially with the way that the platforms evolve. Our franchisees are a great sounding board for that.
People want to be heard and understood. They want to make sure their vision is getting across, because it is their business, and it’s really important to me to make sure that they’re able to do that, but within the guardrails of the Color Me Mine brand.
“My whole theory on franchise marketing is make it plug and play, make it fully ready to use as is, but many elements within every template are fully editable.”
What exactly does your training process look like? I’m particularly interested in how you achieved 90% adoption of Canva within just 30 days of implementing it!
The original Canva training was really an all-hands-on-deck effort. For Painting With a Twist, we were onboarding 300 studio owners at once; for Color Me Mine, it was 120. Canva is amazing because they have their design school with hundreds of bite-sized training videos, but we redid a lot of that so that it’s from the franchisee perspective. I wanted franchisees to see the folder hierarchy that we have set up, see our brand kit, and see exactly the journey they’ll have using this new tool.
We did tons of live trainings, and created extremely extensive reading materials with lots of visuals with an ongoing, updated guidebook for anyone to jump into. And then it was just tenacity — if people hadn’t logged in within a few days, I would call them personally and say, “We launched this, do you know what it is?”
Now, I do multiple marketing trainings a month, which includes Canva training for members who aren’t using it yet. We do them with the intent of training our new franchisees, but we encourage anyone and everyone to join: managers, owners, and anyone who has a hand in the local marketing efforts of the studio.
And then we have a lot of communications with our system throughout the year, including town halls every month and a Facebook group where we’re constantly sharing ideas or feature updates. I create a lot of videos walking people through how I do various marketing activities so they can go through at their own pace and watch over and over again.
We do a ton of playbooks as well — a comprehensive, A-to-Z overview of different channels. For example, for short-form video, we have a playbook that covers content ideas and logistics. It has suggested content calendars, it has printout checklists for content creation, along with the logistical training of going through making that video as well.
“And then it was just tenacity — if people hadn’t logged in within a few days, I would call them personally and say, ‘We launched this, do you know what it is?'”
Printable video content checklist for franchisees
Can you tell me about how you manage the digital media strategies for local marketing?
We manage digital media advertising on behalf of our franchisees and update campaigns every 45 days or sooner if needed. These ads focus on local studio awareness, educating communities about the benefits of pottery painting, highlighting booked business opportunities like kids’ birthday parties or corporate team building events and promoting seasonal offerings around key holidays. Campaigns run across Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads and programmatic display to reach each studio’s unique audience.
The home office creates and uploads all ads so they are ready to use as is but franchisees can customize, copy or upload hyper localized ads when needed with required approvals to ensure brand protection. They also have the flexibility to pause specific campaigns if for example a studio does not want to promote team building events that month. All advertising is managed through Eulerity to streamline the process for every location.
We also keep an eye on those ads every week to see what’s performing the best. And if something falls under a certain click-through rate repeatedly over several weeks, we’ll pause it, change it, potentially pull it entirely, and kind of see what went wrong there. So there’s a lot of constant examining of what’s working and what’s not.
While the franchisees are not responsible for understanding ad strategy at all, we do have a playbook for boosting on Facebook and Instagram, and Google Ads. Sometimes I’ll make suggestions on specific strategies. For instance, for Valentine’s Day, it was how to boost for date night: using the detailed targeting on Facebook, making sure they understood how to upload zip codes, and how to boost in a way that they’re not going to just throw money out.
But, generally, social media advertising is extremely complicated and kind of daunting, so we want to give them that option to not have to worry about it. We can manage it for them; they’ll get roll-up reporting, they can reach out to us and dig into what’s working specifically for their studio, so they get that personal experience with their advertising, but we manage it on the home office level.
You’ve got a lot of work on your plate! How do you prevent yourself from getting burnt out and stay creatively inspired?
Because it’s franchising, I’m not feeding into this unknown, huge entity — I get to see the impact regularly. I’m really close to a lot of the members of our franchise system. We text memes back and forth, or call me when they have a bad day,
I think franchising itself sort of drives that purpose, because it is working with individuals, seeing somebody’s dream come to fruition, watching them expand their portfolio, and achieving dreams they didn’t even know were possible. That’s what keeps me passionate and drives my purpose: the people that I’m making things for.
But a lot boils down to this: Our approach to help our franchisees is incredibly collaborative. My team comes together to make everything happen, especially our ceramics artist who brings more than 20 years of experience in pottery painting and our CEO who began as a local entrepreneur in the PYOP industry. We combine our collective expertise to research and develop trends, which translates into fresh, relevant, and successful campaigns for our franchisees.