We
all know Mother’s Day is coming and, as with all commercially based,
celebratory holidays, your salon should be reaping the benefits. With
the day taking place in just under two weeks, on the 10th of May,
there’s still time to implement some premier promotions to help your
salon capitalise.
Unsure of how to utilise the day to your advantage? See our top 5 tips in making Mother’s Day a marketing gold mine.
1. Partner With Businesses That Cater To Men
Mother’s
day is the one time of year where it pays to cater to a male market,
advertising to fathers and sons looking for a gift for the women in
their lives.
Partner with businesses that traditionally cater to
men, showcasing your mother’s day specials in restaurants, gyms, barber
shops and other businesses with male patrons. You can repay the favour
on September 6th (Father’s Day, if that wasn’t clear).
2. Offer Salon Bouquets and Gift Baskets
Make
up your own salon bouquets to give in lieu of flowers, or go with the
always tried and tested gift basket. Retail products, gift cards and
other salon treats, designed in a particularly eye-catching way, can be
both a special and practical gift idea. Create bouquets for different
hair necessities and types for the ultimate covetable gift.
3. Market a Mother Daughter Experience
Offer
a pampering package for two, allowing your clients to give their
mothers the gift of quality time – and your services. Have a range of
different services on the menu, incorporating beauty and spa treatments
when possible, and treat both mother and daughter to a day of luxury.
4. Include The Extras
Specialised
mother’s day gift bags, wrapping paper, greeting cards and other fun
extras could be an additional incentive in purchasing your products and
services as a Mother’s Day gift. Offer these extras with purchase or
make them available to buy at the register.
5. Share on Social Media
Having
your specials front and centre in the salon is one thing, but promoting
them heavily on social media allows you to access clients and
potential-clients who won’t necessarily be in salon in the next week and
a half. Promote your specials, bouquets, retail options and special
packages online and on all your social media channels for maximum
impact.
With all your Mother’s Day Specials, promotion and access
is key. Window displays, gifts at the counter and signs at the chair
itself will show off just how much you have on offer – be it specials,
retail packages or discounts to mark the day.
Don’t let this marketing opportunity pass you by, and to all the mothers out there – happy Mother’s day!
The Shed Hair and Beauty in Manningtree, Essex proves that salons come in all shapes and sizes – even in the form of ‘a big orange shed’!
It took just two weeks to turn the humble back garden business into a glitzy, chandelier-strewn salon; a space that owner Jessica Wilson is rightfully extremely proud of.
She explains: “A big orange shed came with my house and I could instantly see its potential as a workspace. I tarted it up to the best of my decorating abilities in order to just work by myself and do a bit of hair from home.”
Although it was doing the job, Jessica had bigger plans for the Shed and in August 2014 she began planning its overhaul.
“I paid lots of trips to hotels, cafes and other salons to gather inspiration,” she says. “I liked the feel of my favourite clothes shop, All Saints, with a stripped-back, uncluttered, grown-up look.
Inspiration came from the most unusual places – cute coffee shops in Yorkshire and even the cinema. The seating in there was exactly what I wanted as a waiting area and was perfect as a space-saving solution.”
Although space was at a premium, the redesign also allowed Jessica to include a beauty room at the front after moving an interior wall. “The biggest task was to make sure that every inch of the salon was used well,” she says. “Glynne from Detail Design Studio drew out option after option on auto CAD, so we could really test the space prior to any work starting.”
The salon closed its doors for two weeks while the transformation took place, before Jessica could throw open the doors to her own small slice of hairdressing heaven in her back garden.
A smoky grey crystal chandelier – her favourite piece – is a show-stopper, while grey-brown paint, antique mirror-effect wallpaper and a mirrored sliding door to the beauty room open up the space and create a light, spacious feel. A reclaimed oak beam takes place down one wall, adding a subtle sparkle thanks to silver solder melted into the cracks.
Name: The Shed Hair and Beauty Address: 14 Munnings Way, Lawford, Manningtree, Essex
Owner: Jessica Wilson
How long have you been in the premises? Six years
Number of staff: 2
Number of styling stations:2
Budget: £12,000
Design by: Detail Design Studio
What was the most expensive part of the refit/refurb? Insulation and plastering.
What was the best buy? Reclaimed cinema seats and the oak beam
About
18 people gathered in a semicircle inside Drybar’s new location in the
meatpacking district of Manhattan. It was mid-December, and in the
previous weeks they had been trained in the fine art of giving the
greatest possible blow-dry. They knew how to create the beachy rumpled
look of the Mai Tai blowout and the sharp, pointy, uptightness of the
Straight Up; they knew how to make you look like an extra from “Steel
Magnolias” with the Southern Comfort. They could twist your hair into an
Uptini, if that was your need on a particular day. They knew how to
turn around the salon chair with a flourish so that the customer, who up
to this point had been too mesmerized by watching “The Devil Wears
Prada” on a big-screen TV to notice what was being done, could see her
hair, shiny and smooth, in the mirror on the wall behind her.
As
Drybar’s founder, Alli Webb, sitting atop the bar to greet these new
employees, likes to say: “We’re not selling blowouts. We’re selling
happiness and confidence.”
Alli Webb, the founder of Drybar, with the company’s signature yellow blow-dryer.Credit
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
The
next day, this new Drybar would open. All the appointments — 200
blowouts — had been booked for days. This was Drybar’s 39th store. It
would open its 40th within just a month, on the Upper West Side. A
blowout is a diabolically ingenious product: it can be undone and
destroyed simply by adding drops of water. The top three blow-dry chains
— Drybar, Blo and DreamDry — have more than 100 locations in the United
States so far. As recently as 2007, there was not even one. The feeling
of “happiness and confidence” that comes with smooth hair is real, but
it creates its own self-perpetuating need.
Ms.
Webb didn’t invent the modern blowout, but Drybar is the largest chain
in the United States. Its growth suggests something of a holy war on
frizz, one neighborhood at a time.
Ms.
Webb, who is 40, came to Manhattan from Irvine, Calif., where the
company is based. She attends all of the store openings, to meet the new
stylists, tell the origin story of the company and relate to them how
badly she wants Drybar to keep its mom-and-pop feel. She sat
cross-legged on the bar — that’s the counter where women sit to have
their hair blown dry; everything in Drybar, from the coaster gift
certificates to the Happy Hour shampoo is real bar-themed — and began by
asking the new stylists what they would have been in another life. One
woman, who would have been a “celebrity stylist and/or a ballerina,”
came to Drybar because she had worked at a salon that forced its workers
to wear khaki pants and white button-downs and where stylists weren’t
permitted to talk to one another on the floor. At Drybar, you can talk
to your co-workers, and you can wear anything, as long as it’s black or
white or yellow or denim.
In
just five years, Ms. Webb’s business has grown to a $50 million-a-year
enterprise. (That was in 2014; the company says it is on track to
generate $70 million in revenue in 2015.) This was not what she imagined
growing up in South Florida. Back then, a young Ms. Webb (nee Landau),
was forced to contend daily with her hair, which was wavy, and in humid
Florida, very frizzy. She says her poor mother deployed all her upper
body strength to blow it dry for her, running a brush and hair dryer
simultaneously from crown to end, crown to end, but her mother didn’t
excel at this. She left what Ms. Webb calls “ridges” near the crown of
her head. “How could you, Mom?” Ms. Webb would ask, she remembered with a
laugh.
Ms.
Webb meandered a bit after high school. She dropped out of Florida
State University after a year, and then worked with her brother for a
while in retailing. She enrolled in a beauty school in Boca Raton and,
after she graduated, worked for great hairstylists, like John Sahag, a pioneer in dry cutting, which is what it sounds like. “That was like blow-drying boot camp,” Ms. Webb said.
After
trying public relations for a while, she married Cameron Webb, and they
moved to Santa Monica, Calif., where he became a creative director at
Secret Weapon and she says she was happy as a stay-at-home mother. But
eventually Ms. Webb itched to leave the house. She started a mobile
blow-drying business, posting an ad to her local mothers listserv,
naming her price at $40. She was flooded with emails. Mr. Webb made her a
website.
Soon,
she was busy — overbooked, in fact. Customers were hooked. The
experience was far different from a badly lit Supercuts with children on
booster seats screaming through haircuts. And it was cheaper than
salons that charged $65 to $85.
The
idea started percolating. She went to her brother Michael Landau, who
ran a commercial real estate company, and asked for a loan for a
bricks-and-mortar shop in Brentwood, where most of her clients already
were.
Ms. Webb at age 14. When she was growing up in South Florida, humidity was the enemy.
Mr. Landau, who is bald, was skeptical.
“I
explained to him that there’s girls like me, who have curly hair, who
have been figuring out this their whole life,” Ms. Webb said.
“Basically, I was like, I think if the price is right, I think women
will do this much more regularly.”
The
Webbs put their $50,000 in savings into it. Mr. Landau put in $250,000.
They teamed with Josh Heitler, an architect who was helping Mr. Landau
with a hotel opening, for a “French, shabby chic” look. Mr. Webb took
care of all the creative directing: typefaces, the buttercup yellow on
gray background for all printed materials, the coasters.
Ms.
Webb focused on the experience. She didn’t want clients looking into a
mirror, because “you only need a mirror for cutting.” Otherwise, the
mirror is just a way to feel bad when your hair is wet or pinned up in
an awkward way for the duration of the blow-dry. “I knew the spin would
be the thing,” Ms. Webb said.
She
wanted everyone to be offered a drink, be it water or Champagne. She
wanted the client to be pampered. And she wanted televisions, big
screens right in the line of sight of the client, playing
estrogen-soaked fare like “The Notebook,” with subtitles to counter the
roar of the dryers. And then there was the actual blowout: Start from
the front hairline, since the front is the first thing people see. About
a week before the first shop opened in February 2010, a DailyCandy
article about Drybar turned the trickle of appointments into a flood.
That first day, she arrived at her new shop and called Mr. Webb and Mr.
Landau, who were not yet there. She cried into the phone: “You’ll never
believe what’s happening here.” The place was full, and the bookings
were coming in quickly. The store was a hit.
That
year, they opened three more stores in California, before expanding the
next year to Texas, Arizona, New York and Georgia, and later to
Washington, D.C., and on and on.
Drybar
now has 3,000 employees. There is a line of styling products, hot tools
and brushes, sold in the Drybar shops and at Sephora. The company has
about 50 investors, many of whom began as clients, like the actress Rose
McGowan, and Alexander von Furstenberg, who got in touch about
investing after he picked up his teenage daughter from a Drybar shop
where she was getting a blowout. “I was like, wow, this place is so well
run, just the execution, you know, everything,” Mr. von Furstenberg
said.
Mr.
Landau, the skeptic, said that initially he had just wanted to support
his sister and “would have been thrilled to get the initial investment
back.” But he left his company to work with Drybar full time soon after
the first shop opened. He is now chairman of the board, with John
Heffner, previously of O.P.I., the nail polish company, replacing him as
C.E.O. Ms. Webb’s whim had become a full-fledged business.
Drybar’s
next move will be a return to its mobile roots. In May, Drybar will
release an app called Dry on the Fly: A satellite will locate you and a
Drybar-trained stylist will show up and give you a blowout for $75. The
company plans to open 12 to 15 new shops this year: Locations in Houston
and Beverly Hills just opened. The expansion to Toronto, and to foggy,
frizzy London, will follow. On rainy days, Drybar provides customers
with a free umbrella. “The writing was so on the wall my whole life,”
Ms. Webb said. “It just took me a long time to figure it out. Because
when you look back, oh my God, I’ve always been obsessed with hair.”
“I walked out of this class and into a job in television,” Amber Wilson
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Traffic? Telemarketers? Those who just cannot tell the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’?
In the salon business the most prevalent answer is the no-show.
The
hair salon no-show is our very own industry specific pet peeve, a
common annoyance that unites us all. No matter how many times it
happens, no matter if it’s an accident or intentional, a client allowing
their precious salon spot to go to waste somehow always manages to ruin
your day.
Here’s 5 ways to put that pet peeve behind you.
1. Send a Reminder
We
like to believe the very best of our clients, meaning we assume they
mostly don’t intend to waste our time by not showing up, they just
simply forget. The easy fix it is to start reminding them.
And
because you don’t have the ability to employ a full-time staff member to
manually remind your clients, technology can do it for you. Timely’s Automated SMS and Email service
is shown to reduce no-shows by up to 50%. Salons can specify when the
reminders are sent and customise the template to suit their business.
Employees are also sent immediate notifications with new bookings,
changes and cancellations.
Basically everyone is on the same page (and, most importantly, at their appointment).
2. Make The Call
If
clients don’t confirm their automated reminder, actually picking up the
phone to give them a quick call can be key – particularly for those
clients who have been unreliable in the past.
You can also take this opportunity to upsell other treatments or products to them while you have them on the phone.
3. Offer a Discount for Pre-Paid Services
You’ll
be surprised how much better your client’s memory is once they’ve
already paid for their service – offer them an incentive to do so in the
form of a discount or special if they pay beforehand.
Timely allows you to ask clients to pay either a deposit or the full amount when booking online, securing the booking and reducing no-shows to a minimum.
As
a bonus, you’ll find your clients are far more open to splurge on other
services or retail products if they’ve put the bulk of the payment
behind them by the time they’ve walked through the salon door.
4. Know Your Rules
You
have to have a standard set of rules that you can’t break for any one
client. No, not even your favourite client who just forgot this one
time. If your policy is to charge no-shows, add the fee onto another
bill or simply reschedule, consistency is key. You’ll lose credibility
if you do something for one client, and something else for another.
5. Break Things Off
Letting
go of clients can be difficult. We understand you don’t want to lose
the relationship or turn away payment, but sometimes it’s necessary.
We’re not calling for rash decisions, but if someone is constantly
letting you down it may be time to cut the cord.
Timely helps you
make the hard decisions – storing the no-shows in your Customer Records
and alerting you of this the next time they book.
While the
no-show has always been the collective salon nightmare, with these
strategies in place, the next time someone asks you about your pet
peeve, hopefully you’ll be able to simply complain about the traffic.
With all your Mother’s Day Specials, promotion and access
is key. Window displays, gifts at the counter and signs at the chair
itself will show off just how much you have on offer – be it specials,
retail packages or discounts to mark the day.
