When you operate the world’s largest hair salon franchise, scale is your greatest asset — and your most complex data challenge.
Great Clips has built something remarkable: a franchise network spanning more than 4,400 independently owned and operated locations across the U.S. and Canada, each serving millions of customers every year. But as the network grew, so did the complexity of managing the Great Clips customer data foundation across it.
Every location, every booking platform, every point-of-sale system was capturing customer information in its own way. The result was a familiar enterprise reality — the same customer represented differently across multiple systems, with no reliable way to connect those records into a single, authoritative view.
For a business built on knowing its customers, that was an opportunity worth solving.
Key takeaways
- Great Clips operates 4,400+ independently owned franchise locations — each capturing customer data differently, creating a complex data environment at enterprise scale
- Infoverity partnered with Great Clips across three phases — data strategy, MDM implementation, and operational services — to build a single source of truth for customer data
- The Great Clips MDM implementation reduced duplicate customer records by 30% and now processes 1M+ API calls per day at sub-300ms response time
- The engagement is a reference model for franchise-scale customer data management — with lessons that apply across retail, QSR, and any distributed enterprise network
Great Clips Customer Data Foundation: An MDM Success Story | Infoverity - Table of contents
Why Great Clips invested in data strategy before selecting a technology
Many organisations in this position reach for technology first. Great Clips took a different approach.
Before a single line of integration code was written, before a platform was selected, Great Clips partnered with Infoverity to answer a more fundamental question: what does a trusted, enterprise-wide Great Clips customer data foundation actually look like for a franchise of this scale — and what would it take to build one?
The answer required looking honestly at the full picture: every customer-facing system, every data flow, every team that depended on customer data to do their job. From that assessment came a prioritised, multi-year roadmap — not a technology project, but a genuine data strategy, built around four workstreams that would eventually touch every part of the business.
It’s a phase that’s easy to skip. It’s also the phase that determines whether everything that follows actually works.
Building the Great Clips single source of truth
With strategy in place, Infoverity led the full Great Clips MDM implementation on Informatica’s Customer 360 MDM SaaS platform — the system that would become Great Clips’ single source of truth for customer data. The work was substantial:
- Consolidating records across every source system.
- Building deduplication logic capable of recognising the same customer across dozens of different data entry formats. Validating and updating addresses at scale.
- Creating the householding model that would allow Great Clips to understand customers not just as individuals, but as households.
The outcome: a 30% reduction in customer record volume — and for the first time, a single 360-degree view of every customer, delivered reliably to every system that needed it.
What that meant in practice differed by team:
- For marketing, it meant campaigns built on verified, deduplicated audiences.
- For compliance, it meant CCPA right-to-forget requests handled through an automated pipeline rather than manual case-by-case intervention.
- For analytics, it meant a customer universe the business could actually trust.
But implementation was only part of the story.
Sustaining MDM performance across 4,400+ franchise locations
Deploying an MDM platform across an enterprise is a significant undertaking. Maintaining it — across 4,400+ locations, processing more than a million API calls every single day, for 20 hours of continuous operation — is something else entirely.
Infoverity’s Operational Services team became Great Clips’ dedicated partner for exactly this challenge. The performance benchmarks they’ve sustained are worth pausing on, but the full picture of how they got there — and what it took to keep the system performing at that level while continuing to evolve — is a story that goes beyond what fits in a blog post.
What this Infoverity MDM success story reveals about enterprise data at scale
The Great Clips journey is, in many ways, a blueprint for what enterprise MDM can look like when it’s done right — starting with strategy, executing in phases, and treating operational excellence as a discipline in its own right, not an afterthought.
There are lessons in the approach that apply well beyond the retail franchise sector. How the roadmap was structured. How the platform was configured to handle the specific complexity of franchise-scale data. How AI was applied not to headline use cases, but to the operational work that keeps data clean day after day.
Those details are in the full case study.
Download the Great Clips Success Story
If your organization is working through similar questions about customer data — whether you’re at the strategy stage, mid-implementation, or trying to get more from an MDM platform that isn’t delivering — the Great Clips story is worth reading in full. And if you’d like to talk through what a similar approach could look like for your organization, Infoverity’s data strategy advisors are a good place to start.
Download it now!
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About Infoverity
Founded in 2011, Infoverity is a data and AI advisory and global professional services firm. Infoverity is a recognized industry leader in modern data solutions and value creation in the areas of AI Data Readiness, Agentic AI, as well as broad enterprise data solutions across MDM, PIM, Data Governance, Analytics, Data Integration, Data Lake and Warehousing, Martech, Organizational Change Management, Operational and Managed Services, and Industry-tailored business solutions.
With global headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, EMEA headquarters in Valencia, Spain, and additional locations in Germany and India, Infoverity delivers innovative data solutions to accelerate growth for global enterprises.