Episode 141: Solving Gaps and Building Community in the Salon Suite Industry

And, you know, the gaps that I saw in the industry was the spaces weren't well designed.

They were really basic and sterile and there was no support.

There was no business training.

There was no community.

And the other thing was the industry, even to this day, focuses primarily on just building out space for hairstylists.

What I looked at was the whole beauty industry is half of the industry are hair professionals.

But the other half of the industry are spa professionals, estheticians, eyelash, eyebrow threaders, permanent makeup tattoo artists, people that do Botox and injectables.

The way I saw it was there's this whole other beauty industry that is non-hair.

Why isn't anyone building space that works for them too? And so image is a big differentiator.

We're a place where anyone in beauty can go and find a space that works for them because of how we build our spaces.

And that allows us to go create a really diverse tenant base.

So at each location with 30, 35 studios, it's not all hair professionals.

It's 15 to 18 hair and another 15 or so spa professionals.

And so we get a really diverse mix.

And the magic of that, though, is then there's an organic network there.

They're where people's businesses improve because of all the referral traffic.

When a client walks in and sees that they can get pretty much everything that they would ever want under one roof, they start asking, hey, can you make an introduction? Can I, you know, who does nails? Who does Botox? Who does filler? Who does waxing? And all of a sudden, so this network starts to improve all their businesses because they're getting these client referrals from each other.

That ultimately starts to build a sense of community.

They start to become friends and we really start to establish culture And at a coworking space, culture is the hardest thing to build because they're not employees.

And a lot of coworking and a lot of salon suites, there is no culture.

There's no sense of community.

It's just kind of you come and you go and the doors stay closed.

But image is really different.

It's a very vibrant, exciting energy when you walk in.

The doors are open.