I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with this. Is bringing on a designer/branding person as an equity holding founder a done thing?

Background:
I run a startup which has some fairly good traction, a solid and growing user base, and I'm slowly starting to expand the team by bringing some people in fundamentally important roles on as equity holding founders, to improve the product and start scaling.
Our industry (the service/Food & Bev space) relies quite heavily on design and branding, and social media. Proper branding can run into the thousands of $, and as it's really not something we can afford to pay for outright, or on-going (bootstrapped) at this stage.

As social media is proving to be a great channel for us for customer acquisitions, and presentation is seeming more and more important, I was thinking about offering an experienced designer/branding expert a small slice of equity to come on as a co-founder, to formalise and grow our branding, and to manage, plan and direct our social media presence. I'd like this person to eventually move into a leadership role, running our branding, design and social media.

I'm familiar with people building their team with tech/biz dev co-founders, but I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience bringing someone on in this sort role as an equity holding founder, rather than paying a contractor/freelancer.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.