5 Top Tips for More Successful Salon Retail

Is salon retail the cherry on your profitability cake? Or is it a turd masquerading as a chocolate macaron? Either way, here are my five tips for successful salon retail. Sit down and see what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair, beauty, and more. Successful tips for business owners. Hello, hello, hello my salon lovelies. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. Here we are marching into autumn, 5th of September. This episode is scheduled to come out and how are we feeling about the end of summer, beginning of autumn? How are things feeling in your salon business? It's been a funny old summer, hasn't it? Lots of those traditional patterns seem to have gone by the wayside for a lot of salon businesses that I'm coaching at the moment. It used to be that August was a terrible month for an awful lot of salons, particularly if your customer avatar is a mum, as it was in my business for all those years. But I don't know if it's because the weather in Europe has been so horrendous and much too hot for a lot of people, so they've decided not to go away. Couple with that, the fact that here in the UK, most of the summer's been an absolute washout, so people haven't been holidaying in the UK either. So perhaps they've got a bit of extra money to spend in the salons. Maybe that's why we've stayed a bit busier. Either way, I hope it was a great month for you. I'd love to hear about what's going on in your business, particularly my international buddies. And hello to my listeners down in Melbourne, who managed on the last episode to snatch the title for most episodes listened to in a week. Anyway, what are we talking about today? Well, salon retail is either the love of your life or the bane of your existence. And for this episode, I'm assuming that you want to salon retail. And if you don't, that's absolutely fine. It is, I think, a perfectly legitimate business strategy not to do salon retail at all. If you don't want to, you could actually stick a flag in the ground and say, no, we are not going to tie ourselves to one manufacturer. We want to be able to recommend what's best for you across all manufacturers. And we're not going to have that with any kind of hidden agenda as far as profit is concerned. We're only going to recommend because it's right for you. So we're not going to stock any products at all. Absolutely fine. If all you want to do is have referral links and affiliate links and not stock retail in your salon at all, that's fine too. But if you want stock on the shelves and you want that to be turning into profit, here are my five tips to help you along the way.

And the first one is that we've got to stop tolerating poor performance, please. We've got to make it really clear what we want our teams to be doing as far as retail is concerned. And part of that needs to be a minimum acceptable standard. And we need to stick to it. Now, sometimes I go into a salon as a one-to-one coach. And bear in mind, I charge a lot of money. I do. I'm old these days, you see. So you get to justify charging more and more for your coaching as time goes on. Plus, my guys do really well. But sometimes I'll go into a one-to-one salon and literally they are selling zero retail. Nothing's shifting at all or maybe one or two products a month. Much more is going through the salon as shop use. So I'll go into a salon and sometimes we set that minimum acceptable standard as just one product. Perhaps we just need to ask our beauty therapists or our stylists or our estheticians to just sell one product a week. And below that, that minimum acceptable standard, the conversation needs to change. We need to have the confidence to say, actually, below one product a week, we don't feel that you're doing your job properly anymore. And we've either got to believe in retail enough that we're happy to have that difficult conversation or push it to one side and don't retail at all. So my second tip is to price it in. If you're struggling to get some products shifted or you're getting frustrated because you know that your clients should be taking a retail product home after certain services, price it in. Bundle it in. We used to do this with hair extensions. Now, I don't know if you have had hair extensions or carried out hair extensions as a service. If you're a beauty therapist or esthetician, please translate. I know you're bright enough to do this. But when we used to do hair extensions, if you didn't follow proper aftercare instructions on hair extensions, things fell apart very quickly, my darling. Things would turn into a hot mess very, very soon after you'd had your extensions fitted. So what's the best way for me to guarantee that you're using the right shampoo, the right conditioner, the right brush, the right mask on those hair extensions? Price it into the service and give it them in a bag at the end of the service.

And we could be doing this with our high-end facial treatments, certainly with hair extensions, definitely with color correction as far as hairdressing services are concerned. Have you ever done a color correction and then stressed about what she's going to wash her hair with when she gets home? For goodness sake, let's make sure that we've got the right stuff in everybody's bathrooms. My tip number three is to give products away. And when I say give, I'm using inverted commas. If you're letting me come in your eyes over on YouTube, you can see my inverted commas. If you're on my podcast, then you're just going to have to trust me. But when we say give it away, there's a couple of things that I mean there. The first is as part of our new client package in my salon, a professional product was priced in included in that package because a quick survey told us between 60 and 65% of our new clients have never tried a professional retail product before. So the quickest way for us to get a product in their hand to break that cycle of not having professional aftercare was to give them a product to take home. That was also the opener, you see, cleverly, Uncle Phil using his brain. That was also the opener on the second visit because we could say, well, how did you get on with that shampoo? You must be running out of it by now. Do you need the conditioner to go with it? So on. So it opened a retail conversation very naturally on visit number two. But the other thing I'm talking about is sampling. And I think this is something that we used to do really well. Not so much anymore. And I don't know if it's because profit margins have got tighter so people aren't sampling quite so much. But it does rely on a process. You can't just throw samples at people and expect them to come back in in a day or two and take stuff off your shelves. It doesn't work like that. There's got to be some kind of follow up. It's got to be targeted sampling and then a follow up process to make sure we're converting that into a profitable activity. Number four, I want you to use your supplier a lot more. And we were really good at this. In fact, at one stage, I even managed to get our sales rep coming in and doing the full stock take for me before I had my meeting with her. And then she could tell me exactly what we needed to order to take our stock levels back up again. But also, as far as ad hoc product knowledge was concerned, any time there was a new product being launched, we used to drag the rep into the team meeting and get them to teach my team how to sell the new product. Use your supplier. And if your supplier is not willing, well, guess what, darlings? There's an awful lot of competition out there. And if they're being a little bit shitty with you, maybe it's time to look for someone else. And we've done this several times during my ownership of salons.

Essentially, what we used to find was that we would go into a product company, usually when they weren't huge, and we would be an important account for them. We were usually a key account because we do retail very well. We only ever had one salon, though, bear in mind. And if you're a key account for a supplier, you get access to usually external training, usually some added incentives, maybe even a bigger discount. And then over time, as the companies grow, our account became less and less important to them. So they started treating us less and less well. So sometimes it does you an awful lot of business favours to jump ship and find someone who is going to appreciate your custom that little bit more. That takes me nicely, though. My rep doing the stock count, my God, that was an absolute coup. I only ever managed to con one of them into doing it, though. But it does take me into point number five, which is around stock control. We've got to make sure that the stuff on our shelves is turning over regularly. If you are dusting products more frequently than you're selling them, we need to look at a measure called speed of sale. And I'm sure if you do a little search, I'm sure I've done an episode on speed of sale as part of my podcast series before. And I'm going to give you one extra bonus tip because your Uncle Phil loves to go the extra mile, push the extra inch, over deliver whenever we can. And that's to bring retail much earlier into your client visit. The biggest problem I see, and I'm looking at you, if you are working in a beauty salon or particularly a spa, nine times out of ten, I'll go into a spa, have a facial, have a massage. And then as almost as an afterthought, somebody ticks a few boxes on a leaflet and stuffed it into my hand before I head off to reception. No, what you need to do is start bringing that retail conversation right to the beginning of the visit in the consultation. Let me give you an example from my old hubby, my poor, worn down, depressed and stressed husband. After all these years, bless him, still hanging on by his fingernails. But what he will do is, and he's a hairdresser, by the way, so you need to do some translating if you're beauty or aesthetics. But what he will do is say, yes, we can create this wonderful colour for you. We can create this wonderful look. But if this is the style you're after, these are the products you're going to need to maintain that.

Is that viable for you? Is that possible for you or not? Because if not, we need to go for something lower maintenance or a different texture or a different colour. Very, very clever. So they've committed to the retail before we've even picked up the pair of scissors or sent them off to the basin for a shampoo. So there you go. My five tips on retailing better in your salon business. What have I missed? Let me know. Or is there a topic you'd like me to cover on a future episode? Don't forget, one of these episodes a week, I think it's next week actually, is a question and answer. So please send your questions over, phil at buildyoursalon.com. I love hearing from my salon owner friends. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your eyes and ears again. And until then, take care. Sit down and see what's going on with the Queen of Salon's hair. Beauty and more successful tips for business owners. All on Build Your Salon.