Your collective salon identity is crucial. Here’s how to achieve it.

What has the pandemic taught you? Perhaps to expect the unexpected is one thing. Life is subject to change.

As a salon owner, managing stylist and client relations is trickier when we need to factor in sickness and isolation, on top of annual leave and regular team changes like maternity leave and people moving on. 

It’s twofold: Clients want consistency and an assured outcome, and we increasingly need them to be fluid between stylists. To be truly sustainable we shouldn’t operate as a group of individual stylists working under one roof - having a collective salon identity is more important than ever. Here are some ideas to get started:

• #SocialMedia - Ensure you’re showcasing and tagging the work of stylists across your salon on your social media feeds. This helps clients become more familiar and confident with everyone’s skills.

• Branding - Paying a graphic designer to create your branding and website is worth every cent in the long run. Make sure you use the same style, palette and logo across everything from appointment cards to newsletters - it creates a feeling of cohesion.

• Educate - A hairdressers education doesn’t end with their apprenticeship. Take advantage of training offered by your suppliers, online courses and those with expertise across your team. A good rule to follow: though they may specialise in one area, every stylist should know how to do everything.

• Consultation - Book more time for consultations within your appointments, especially for the first time a client sees a different stylist.

• Rebook smartly - If a stylist is away sick, in the first instance offer an appointment with another stylist who may have availability that day. It makes business sense to fill gaps first and reduce a backlog of appointments.

• Use color bar manager - To capture your client formulations in real-time, every time. One of the biggest limitations to client fluidity is a stylist who stores colour recipes in their head only (or records them in a way that is difficult to read or understand!). Having your client records on CBM makes them instantly and accurately accessible, in one universal format.

• Create client consistency - press duplicate - Keep all your client colour records up-to-date with CBM by pressing duplicate on a record. Many clients want their tried and tested colour, knowing that recipe is on hand can give them all the confidence to see a different stylist when they need to.