Duck & Dry Signs UK Franchise Expansion Deal

Duck & Dry, the London-founded blow-dry and styling brand, has signed a partnership with Hero Brands to franchise up to 60 UK locations over the next five years. The deal marks Hero Brands' first move into beauty after building its reputation franchising restaurant concepts such as German Doner Kebab.

From Founder-Led to Franchise-Backed

Duck & Dry built its early growth on company-owned salons across London, including recent openings at Notting Hill's The Whiteley and John Lewis Oxford Street. The Hero Brands partnership shifts the brand toward a hybrid model that mixes franchised and company-owned sites, with Hero Brands supplying franchise development, operator recruitment and site selection expertise built scaling multi-unit restaurant deals.

The Target Cities

Duck & Dry is recruiting franchise partners for Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh as it tests whether its premium positioning travels beyond the capital. Franchisees get support across salon design, recruitment, training, launch marketing and ongoing performance management, the standard package for a brand testing whether a metro-specific concept can hold up nationally.

Why a Restaurant Franchisor Bought In

Hero Brands' bet is that the operational systems it built recruiting and training restaurant franchisees transfer directly to a service-based beauty concept: site selection, unit economics discipline and a pipeline of multi-unit operators. For Duck & Dry, the trade is giving up some brand control in exchange for a franchise-development engine most single-category beauty brands do not have in-house.