Everything Is a Cycle: What Retail, City Hall, and the Holidays Taught Us About Systems
There’s a lesson that shows up again and again in long-term client work, municipal communications, and even in the chaos of the holidays with kids:
Everything is a cycle.
The cycles run smoother when you stop reinventing them.
Before the studio was called Frances Eugenia Design, it lived its earlier life as Haus of Adams—a scrappy, fashion-adjacent design shop that brought on JoxSox, a performance sock brand, as its first major fractional client, a collaboration that’s still ongoing. Under the guidance of a very hands-on marketing director, the studio focuses on art direction and seasonal campaign execution, and is currently deep in the thick of holiday work. The studio name evolved, but the discipline hasn’t.
In retail, the cyclical nature of the work becomes obvious pretty early. Every season makes itself known: back-to-school, holiday push, spring refresh, slow summer drift, fall sport spikes. After a few years, the themes and visuals rotate, but the underlying structure barely moves.
The second this becomes clear, the system forms and quietly becomes the real creative engine. Templates appear. Kits emerge. The bones of campaigns are built so the next cycle doesn’t chew through time, attention, and sanity. Those early Haus of Adams years with JoxSox were less about “doing something new” and more about learning to respect the rhythm.
Fast-forward to my steps into municipal communications, and the same pattern is waiting, in office casual instead of golf shorts.
In a city like Cleveland Heights, the year repeats itself with almost retail-like precision:
Budget hearings cluster in the same window.
Juneteenth, Pride, the Happy 5K, and fall leaf pickup return every year.
Council meetings follow consistent formats.
Snow alerts, construction updates, hiring cycles, and event seasons come back on schedule.
From the outside, it may appear to be pure chaos. Inside, if anyone is tracking the pattern, it starts to feel more like choreography. The issue I have found is beyond the lack of structure—it’s that no one has bothered to write the structure down or build around it.
The same logic that shapes seasonal retail campaigns is also applied to civic communications, including repeatable structures, decision logs, templates, naming conventions, creative kits, and reusable asset systems. Communications stops being a yearly reinvention and becomes a yearly refinement.
That same systems mindset becomes essential once the holiday season rolls in at home.
Work/life balance, in practice, rarely looks like “doing less.” It looks more like doing once and reusing often. If a Q4 campaign can be templated, so can December.
A household calendar can be treated like a merch calendar:
gift lists, meal plans, client deadlines, school concerts, municipal timelines, shipping cutoffs, and year-end reflections. The predictable pieces go on the board first, so there’s room for the unpredictable ones—glitter explosions, last-minute events, or a child in tears because a cookie “looks wrong.” The point isn’t a flawless month. The point is that not everything feels like an emergency.
That’s the power of systems: Treat the template like your spirit guide. A guide that gives you permission. Permission to stop starting from scratch every time life repeats itself. Permission to use the structure as support instead of improvising under pressure.
Because life does repeat itself—yearly, seasonally, quarterly, daily.
If you’re ready to stop reinventing every cycle—whether that’s your city’s communications, your team’s campaigns, or your own December—I build the kind of templates, calendars, and creative systems that hold up year after year. You can explore done-for-you design kits and fast-turnaround services in the Studio Shop, or book a short consult if you need help mapping your next cycle before it starts.
