Volume, Value, and The Drybar, Pt. 1: Low Prices Not Guaranteed
There are three main business models in the beauty industry:
Low price / high volume
Mid price / mid volume
High price / low volume
Corporate chain salons like SuperCuts, GreatClips, and Smart Style have historically followed the low price, high volume model. These spaces are usually spare, with basic furniture and fluorescent lighting. You can get a haircut for anywhere between $10-$20, often without a shampoo.
In recent years, a few concepts have reworked this model for a more upscale clientele. Blowout bars like Drybar and color-exclusive salons like Madison Reed built their businesses around one core service and maximized it for timing and pricing. They sit on the upper end of the lower price range, usually between $45-$60 dollars.
Historically, these salons have excluded clients with tighter curl patterns and denser hair. Not outright, but through smaller details like not hiring or training staff in textured hair, and by basing their timing and pricing on an “ideal client” with medium density, medium texture, and straight to wavy hair.
At the same time, many independently owned salons catering to Black clients, operated on the same low price, high volume model, just in a different form. Clients were double or triple-booked by the hour where services ran like an assembly line. Relaxer would be applied in five to ten minutes, then process while the stylist worked on two or three more of the same service. You’d be taken to the bowl to be neutralized, cleansed and conditioned by the shop girl or the stylists assistant. You’d be back in the chair for a mold down, a wet roller wrap, or a roller set and sat under the dryer for 2-5 hours. Then you sat in the stylists chair for 10-20 additional minutes for a comb out, curl, or finishing touches on your molded style.
At this pace, a stylist could do twenty to thirty clients on a busy Saturday, the same way a blowout stylist might complete ten identical services in a full shift.
Now for the numbers.
If each service averages fifty dollars, a blowout stylist working an eight-hour shift, usually as a W-2 employee, generates about $500 in service revenue. This stylist will only see a fraction of this revenue. While they are responsible for being booked on the 45 minute interval, staying on time, and providing a quality service to each client they are only being paid $12-$18/hour on average (depending on geography). Their wage automatically assumes that each client they take will tip them $5-$10 to boost that wage to $17-$28/hour to bring it to a “living wage”. Many stylists start their careers in these environments because those are the available jobs that pay hourly and promise steady work when you have no clientele to count on.
An independent stylist serving twenty clients at $50 each makes $1000 in gross revenue. But that stylist isn’t a W-2 employee or a 1099 contractor. They are a business owner, responsible for every expense. After accounting for rent, supplies, and additional business expenses, their take-home could range anywhere from $250-$600 for that workday.
Step back from the numbers for a moment. Both of these business models are just plain exhausting. The repetition, long hours, and physical strain wear the body down. By year two to five, after getting booked, busy, and burned out, many start to look for alternatives or leave the industry altogether. Only one in five cosmetology graduates is still working in the field five years after school.
The way we’re taught to work in this industry, fast, cheap, and constantly on, burns out some of the most promising talent we have.
The ones who don’t quit? We’ll get to them in Part 2.