A designer hands you a beautiful campaign concept. Bold colors. A striking layout. A visual that stops you in your tracks on a screen.
Now, make a full-wrap window graphic. A rigid board in a stadium hotel lobby. A 500-foot fence banner. A tabletop card, a shoe wall tag, a bus wrap, and a billboard — all from the same campaign, all at print-ready spec, all on deadline.
At most companies, that might fall on the designer. At Brooks Running, it doesn’t — Brooks has built something not every brand its size has: a deeply integrated in-house creative team that functions like an agency, with dedicated roles across the creative process.
Designers stay in the creative. Production designers handle the technical translation. And the person who built that production design function from scratch — and has been leading it for over a decade — is Johnny Hubbard.
Johnny was Brooks’ very first production designer. When he arrived in 2014, the entire creative department was about 10 people. Today, it’s 107. They call themselves the Creative Lab, and they own every visual the company produces — from social media to stadium graphics to the shoe wall tags in the Brooks Trailhead store.
Johnny’s role sits at the seam where all of that creative ambition meets the physical world. His team takes the designer’s artwork, pulls it apart, resizes it, specs it for every format and substrate, and builds the files that get sent to print. It’s a discipline most people outside the industry don’t know exists — and it’s the reason Brooks’ brand shows up the way it does in the real world, every time.
30 Years of Knowing How Things Get Made
Most production designers come up through graphic design programs. Johnny came up through film school, darkrooms, and museum publishing.
He earned a BA in professional photography and started his career in the mid-’90s when the Seattle film industry dried up as productions migrated to Vancouver. So he pivoted — into publishing and print production, first at Trader Publishing, then at IO Color, where he produced fine art books for museum exhibitions at institutions across the country.
He continued his publishing and print journey at Macy’s Northwest, Nordstrom, and Microsoft before landing at Eddie Bauer, where he got deep into retail graphics, window programs, and large-format display production across 400+ stores.
As his craft sharpened, he continued to keep an eye on Brooks.
“I’d always paid attention to Brooks — the creative stood out. It was playful, a little unexpected, and full of personality. I remember thinking, that looks like a really fun place to work.”
He came in as the only production designer in a tiny creative department. A couple of designers, a copy editor, and Johnny — the person responsible for taking everything they created and making it buildable, printable, and installable. That was 2014, and the company has been growing ever since.
A Creative Agency That Lives Inside the Company
Brooks doesn’t let its brand out of the building. Roughly 98% of all creative is produced in-house by the Creative Lab. Occasionally, the volume outpaces the team, or a project calls for a fabricated element or specialized capability the team isn’t set up to build — like a three-dimensional digital billboard in Times Square. In those cases, an outside agency or freelancer steps in. But even then, the Creative Lab reviews and approves every piece of outside work before it goes live. The brand never leaves their hands.
The scope of what they cover is massive. The Creative Lab serves every stakeholder in the building: Social media, events, retail, sports marketing, paid media, out-of-home, the website, even HR materials and internal parties. If it has a visual component, this team touches it.
“We’re very serious about owning our brand, and making sure it looks right. We want to own it, because we’re such a quirky group and we really have a very specific style.”
That’s a deliberate choice — and it puts enormous operational demands on the production design team. A single campaign might need to live as a highway billboard, a window graphic at an REI, a tabletop card in the Trailhead store, a fence banner at a track event, and a digital asset for social — all at the same time, all from the same creative. Johnny’s team is the connective tissue that makes that translation happen across every surface and format.
The way it works is intentionally structured. Designers come up with the creative look — the campaign concept, the visual direction. Once that’s established, Johnny’s production design team takes over. They take the designer’s art files, pull them apart, and iterate the design into every format it needs to live in: Windows, wall graphics, desk cards, billboards, bus wraps, stadium banners. The production designers are building, stretching, speccing, and coordinating with vendors to get everything to print.
“You just want to keep a designer creative and having fun. When you really get into how we’re going to build it — the size, the DPI, all the specifications — it’s very technical. So that’s where the designer’s usually out pretty early, and then our production designers are actually building things.”
When COVID hit in 2020, the Brooks Creative Lab was 25 people. The running industry exploded — health clubs shut down, people went outside, and Brooks couldn’t keep up with demand. In two years, the creative department tripled.
“We grew from 25 to like 85 just in those two years. It was nuts. When we all came back, a lot of us hadn’t even met in person.”
Today, Johnny co-manages one of Brooks’ two production design teams — roughly 10 production designers in all. The team grew too big for one person to manage, so it split into two. But rather than step back from the day-to-day, Johnny stayed on as a working manager — keeping himself in the middle of projects and in close communication with stakeholders, designers, and print partners like SuperGraphics. Ready to problem-solve and keep decision-making fast and agile.
His team focuses on the OOH, event, and retail side of the work, while staying cross-trained across print, events, digital, and catalog… so the operation doesn’t break when someone’s out. That infrastructure is what allows Brooks to keep the work in-house at the speed the business demands.
How a Campaign Goes from Concept to Every Surface
When Brooks takes on a major event — a hype house, a pop-up, a stadium takeover — the process starts with a site visit. Johnny and the SuperGraphics team fly out together, measure every wall, every window, and every surface where a graphic could go. A designer usually comes along too, to start getting a feel for the space and what’s possible.
But the material conversation starts right alongside the creative one. While the designer is concepting, Johnny is already bouncing ideas off SuperGraphics about what each surface can support — talking through what might work as a cling versus a rigid board versus an SEG fabric graphic, and getting a sense of what the space will actually allow.
“Sometimes, we get into a space and the wall’s really wobbly… or you can’t cling on it, because it would just look off. So your team will help come up with a solution, like a rigid board or an SEG fabric graphic. That’s where we really get tight with SuperGraphics.”
SuperGraphics puts together a deck documenting every surface and what can be done with it. The designer mocks up the creative direction. And the whole time, Johnny is working the technical side in parallel — so by the time the concept is locked, his team already knows how to build it.
Once the creative is approved and the budget is signed off, Johnny takes the designer’s files, builds everything out to spec, and releases them to print. Then, come install day, he shows up on site — a week early, usually — and works alongside the SuperGraphics install crew to make sure everything goes up right.
That level of coordination — from site visit to file prep to install oversight — is what most people never see behind a branded event or retail environment. It’s the craft that separates a concept that looks great in a deck from one that actually lands in the real world.
The Trailhead Was the Testing Ground. The New Stores Are What Comes Next.
Brooks’ Trailhead store — their flagship on the ground floor of the Fremont headquarters — has been the brand’s retail laboratory for years. Full window wraps. Wall graphics. Campaign signage. Shoe wall displays. Cash wrap graphics. If you can name a retail graphic format, it’s been tested there.
Beyond Trailhead, Brooks has built physical brand presence through shop-in-shops at major retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods, REI, Academy Sports, and Scheels — plus independent running shops nationwide. Johnny’s team produces graphics for all of them, from full shop-in-shop environments in massive sporting goods stores to a single poster for a mom-and-pop running shop in a small town.
All of that work — the Trailhead flagship, the nationwide shop-in-shop program, the events, the pop-ups, the stadiums, the out-of-home — is the foundation for what’s coming next.
Brooks has announced they’re opening new brick-and-mortar stores: in U Village Seattle and Boston.
It’s a landmark moment. And the infrastructure Johnny and his team have built over the past decade — the production design capability, the vendor relationships, the deep understanding of how Brooks’ brand translates into physical space — is exactly what makes this next chapter possible.
“Our Trailhead store has really been our guinea pig. We’ve been able to experiment, learn, and evolve by trying things right here at our Seattle HQ.”
The new stores will carry everything the Trailhead pioneered — branded fixtures, campaign graphics that rotate every few months, and dedicated run club spaces where local communities can gather, grab electrolytes, and hang out before or after a group run. Retail as community hub — built from the same culture that drives Brooks internally.
And every window, wall, display, and surface in those stores will be built by Johnny’s team and produced by the partners they’ve been working with for over a decade.
Serious About the Work. Not About Themselves.
If there’s a thread that runs through everything Johnny describes about Brooks, it’s this: The brand takes its creative seriously without taking itself seriously.
Not everyone at the company runs. About half do. The other half walks the Burke-Gilman, or hikes, or just goes outside. And that’s exactly the point.
“Whether you run around the block or you run a marathon, it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares. It’s just to get out and have fun.”
That ethos — inclusive, welcoming, community-driven — is what Brooks’ creative has to feel like every time it shows up in the world. Today, that expression comes to life through a highly integrated creative model, where internal teams and external partners work together to ensure the brand shows up consistently — whether it’s on a phone screen, a storefront, or a starting line.
The result is work that feels unmistakably Brooks: Human, optimistic, and built to meet runners wherever they are.
Johnny and the Creative Lab have helped build the foundation for that system over the past decade — ensuring that as the brand grows, its creative shows up with the same clarity, consistency, and character at every scale.
As Brooks takes this exciting next step into owned retail, we’re honored to keep building alongside a team that cares as deeply about how their brand shows up in the physical world as they do about the creative that inspires it.
Is Your Brand Ready to Scale? Your Store Graphics Should Be, Too.
Whether you’re opening your first owned retail location or rolling out campaign refreshes across hundreds of doors, SuperGraphics delivers the large-format printing, sustainable materials, and nationwide installation to bring your in-store brand experience to life — with the precision, speed, and white-glove service that high-stakes retail demands.
