Opening Your Own Salon

Last year Mario Doria the Director of Maestro Hair Salons shared his thoughts with Style Street on opening a new salon. He had recently stumbled upon Style Street and has the following to say.

This site has some really cool stuff. Some of the articles are really good, and some are I think misleading.
For example Opening a salon for $5000, has disaster written all over it.
It’s a saturated market and only the strong thrive the rest close down.

Before opening a salon, there should be a reason of why it’s going to work, other than you being the best hairstylist in the world. Unfortunately that’s not enough to succeed in the business world.
If these articles are for helping and guiding young hairdressers about to embark on as business venture, they should include,

• Preperation, surveying the area,
• population, average income, average age group in suburb, and see if this fits the kind of salon your dreaming of opening.
• Checking out existing salons, to see if there is a place for you to create something new and fresh.
• Marketing/ advertising plan
• Salon look and feel, the kind of space you wish to create.
• Banking, Accounting, and legal Issues
• Suppliers
• Branding, Image.

If these things along with many others are not addressed in the preperation stage, you will be one of the 75% of salons that fail and eventually go broke.

What our industry doeasn’t need is more salons going broke and bastardizing it along the way, with $5 haircuts and $25 colors in $5000 salons.

We can control our industries future and build it to how it once was many moons ago. Hairdressers were one of the most highly respected trades, and were viewed as artists.
We need to get back to that place where we charge what we are worth per hour like all the other trades. And to do that we need beautiful places to work from that inspire clients and give them an experience worth paying for and returning back again and again.
Opening a $5000 salon I don’t think so. Let’s fill our young stylists minds with sound advice they can use and not false hopes that will see them as the 30th salon in a suburb doing one client a day because of a special they saw on the window.

We have a serious problem in Australia with too many bad hairdressers, in bad salons doing bad work under priced. Which means they can’t employ quality stylists and pay them what their worth, and so they pay the minimum and get the stylists that are at the bottom end who don’t care about their ability or our industry.
As Doctor Phill says “We can’t change what we don’t acknowledge”

I would love to see a governing body for our industry that could have a set standard before one could be issued with a licence to open a salon.

Other countries have stylists earning double what our stylists are earning. We need to address these issues and have new salons that open become a part of our solution not the problem. $5000 salons I don’t think so.