Why There Are Too Many Salons. And What It Means for Yours

Your prices aren't being held down by your clients.

Your profits are being hammered by the three salons on the same street, the two people renting chairs five doors away, and the one person at the end of your road working from their shed.

Hello, hello, hello my salon friends.

Phil Jackson here, your Queen of Salons, coming all over the internet again with another dose of my Wise Owl wisdom.

And I'm gonna be really honest with you, this has the opportunity, this episode has the opportunity of being gloomy as hell.

And I'm gonna try my very, very best to make sure that it doesn't turn out that way because there are more places to get your hair, your nails, your brows, your skin, your injectables done than at any point I can remember in my career.

We're not just talking about salons with premises in that probably what feels quite old-fashioned way with the salon industry that I grew up in, but also we've got room renters, chair renters, home-based businesses, mobile.

We've got rooms above shops, clinics in the backs of gyms, people working out of sheds and garages.

The barrier to entry in our industry has collapsed, and you can be trading in a couple of weeks with a qualification, a bed or a chair and a basin and an Instagram account, and then you're in.

And that's what's happening more and more and more.

Now, that in itself I don't have a problem with.

Um, I don't think that this drive towards regulation and increasing the amount of hoops that we have to jump through to open a business, I don't think that's the answer to this at all.

And in some ways it's kind of exciting because what we end up with is these kind of scrappy little businesses, and that's very vibrant.

It's interesting.

It spices things up.

And that kind of bootstrapping a business and throwing stuff together I find kind of interesting.

Um, and also as a salon business coach, of course I wanna see more and more businesses in our industry, but think it through.

The problem is we have a very old-fashioned economics game at play here, which is supply and demand.

Your prices aren't being held down by your clients.

Your profits are being hammered by the three salons on the same street, the two people renting chairs five doors away, and the one person at the end of your road working from their shed.

Hello, hello, hello my salon friends.

Phil Jackson here, your Queen of Salons, coming all over the internet again with another dose of my Wise Owl wisdom.

And I'm gonna be really honest with you, this has the opportunity, this episode has the opportunity of being gloomy as hell.

And I'm gonna try my very, very best to make sure that it doesn't turn out that way because there are more places to get your hair, your nails, your brows, your skin, your injectables done than at any point I can remember in my career.

We're not just talking about salons with premises in that probably what feels quite old-fashioned way with the salon industry that I grew up in, but also we've got room renters, chair renters, home-based businesses, mobile.

We've got rooms above shops, clinics in the backs of gyms, people working out of sheds and garages.

The barrier to entry in our industry has collapsed, and you can be trading in a couple of weeks with a qualification, a bed or a chair and a basin and an Instagram account, and then you're in.

And that's what's happening more and more and more.

Now, that in itself I don't have a problem with.

Um, I don't think that this drive towards regulation and increasing the amount of hoops that we have to jump through to open a business, I don't think that's the answer to this at all.

And in some ways it's kind of exciting because what we end up with is these kind of scrappy little businesses, and that's very vibrant.

It's interesting.

It spices things up.

And that kind of bootstrapping a business and throwing stuff together I find kind of interesting.

Um, and also as a salon business coach, of course I wanna see more and more businesses in our industry, but think it through.

The problem is we have a very old-fashioned economics game at play here, which is supply and demand.