Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and before you bother asking, yes, I’m a little bit under the weather. It’s okay. I’ll be fine. Enjoy a little bit of extra gravel in my voice this week.
This week I wanted to come in and do a deep dive into retail, specifically misunderstandings, misfires, and the massive potential. Now I know retail is a dirty four-letter word for some of you. A lot of people are very retail-opposed. We’re seeing a really interesting shift in the relationship between retail and the hairdresser today. I think we’re seeing a lot of shifts away from carrying retail in the salon. A lot of people are going virtual with it, selling just through online third parties.
There’s a lot of shifts and changes that have happened in the last five years and I felt like let’s get dirty with it, let’s dive in, let’s talk about it.
I will say I’m very biased coming in talking about retail. I do believe it still is a critical part of the salon experience. So if you feel like, “Man, it seems like she’s really pushing to have retail in the salon,” yeah, 100%. That’s my stance at the end of the day, but I want to explain why I want to talk about what your different options are and why I think retail is so critical and why it could be a major revenue stream for you.
So let’s start right at the top with another R word: the recession. Something you should know is that when the economy takes a downturn, there are certain sectors of markets that tend to do well. Retail in the beauty industry has a chance of doing really, really well, even in a downturn. We’re going to talk about why at Thrivers Live in detail, but I want you to start thinking about your relationship with retail now because what you have to remember is that if the economy shifts and changes, everything you know to be true about your business could flip overnight. And so I want you to think more broad and open minded in this season.
I’m getting a ton of DMs right now, like several a day saying, “Britt, how do I prepare for the recession? What if I’m in a luxury service space? How do I ensure that my income stays?”
I think this is a really good time and season for us to not go backwards in all of our businesses and start doing really wacky, emotionally-based things, but say, “How can I have multiple avenues to make a sale available at my disposal?” And I really just think retail is one of those levers that’s never going out of style.
One of the things that we like to do is blame the big box stores on why we can’t sell retail. We love to blame Amazon. We love to blame Sephora. It’s so much fun to blame Ulta and then we start blaming like the distributors themselves, right? We look at hair care brands that used to only be available in the salon a decade ago and now most every hair care brand, you can just buy directly from their website.
So we say to ourselves, “Well, why would I ever carry those brands in the salon? There’s too much competition. Clients would prefer to buy on Amazon.” That’s my favorite. “Clients would prefer to buy at Sephora.” Now they wouldn’t. Why would they prefer to make a whole nother trip to get those things?
Then with Amazon, you say, “Well, no, but they have Prime two-day shipping.” That’s two days slower than you selling it to them. I’m just not buying it. I’m not believing in it. And the reason why you’re losing sales to any kind of third party is because your sales strategy isn’t strong enough. I’m sorry. It’s not.
Likely the reason why it’s not strong enough is because you’re trying to sell. You should never be trying to sell. I don’t like to sell, you probably don’t like to sell. Instead, we like to educate and create opportunities, and that’s where the real potential lies.
So I want to talk about the money that can be made in retail. I have somebody incredible. She was going to be coming and doing a little spotlight feature for us at Thrivers Live. This is somebody who went from doing about 47 grand in services in 2018 to—she closed 2021 at $300,000, just under $300,000 in gross revenue. Now that was a combination of service and retail, but this is a single service provider, okay? 5x their revenue and then some in just four years. That’s amazing. And retail was a huge component of this for the stylist. They did over $70,000 in retail in 2021. Individual person.
I was speaking at an event in January and we had some salon teams there who were doing $30,000 a month in retail.
So retail is still alive and well. It’s just a question of if you are proficient at selling it.
Even as I rattle off those gross numbers, a lot of you are like, “Mmm, there she goes again with those gross numbers. I want to know what the net profit is.” I get that. I want to tell you what the net profit is. Here’s the challenge is that a lot of people are still using keystone markup and I don’t believe keystone is profitable.
Run the numbers on it. Just think about it for a second. If you buy a bottle of shampoo for $10 and you sell it for 20, that’s called keystone markup. That’s a 100% markup, meaning you sell it for 100% of what you paid for it. That’s called keystone. So you buy it for 10. You sell it for 20. And then in your mind, you’re like, “Well, the profit is $10.” No, it is not. Because then you have to take that $10 “profit”—I’m doing air quotes, “profit”—and go back to the beauty supply store and spend that $10 to buy another $10 bottle of shampoo to put it on your shelf.
Now I’ve done the cycles and I know that if you repeat that enough times, eventually you’ll create a margin. It takes so long and it’s such a volume that independent beauty professionals today really struggle with keystone and often it puts ’em underwater. They can’t make enough.
Even as I’m saying that, I know some of you are like, “Ah ah ah, so what I do is I wait for a sale and when everything goes 20% off, I stock up.” That is a very fragile way to run your business. You are banking on distributors having sales, right? And if distributors don’t have sales, you just don’t sell retail. So you have a contingency for your ability to sell and make money. You can only sell and make money if your distributor is offering a discount. Why is that the plan? Why instead wouldn’t we say, “Okay, so the problem is the markup. The problem is the markup is not high enough, which is why I’m relying on buying at a discount in order to make a margin.” Why don’t you just eliminate the issue of keystone not being enough and mark it up higher?
And that’s when we start to get silly and we start to say things like, “Well, if I did that, I couldn’t beat out Sephora. I couldn’t beat out Amazon.” No, no. Again, it goes back to the issue. Your clients should not even be price shopping. They shouldn’t be saying, “Oh my goodness, it’s $3 cheaper when I buy it at Sephora.” That should never cross their mind. You are their resource and if your clients are questioning you over $3 or you’re showing them a bottle of shampoo, and they’re saying, “Let me take a picture of that, ‘cause I’m going to order it right now on my phone,” and then you stand there feeling silly, holding the bottle of shampoo as they take the photo so they can order it on Amazon, again, that’s a you problem. Your sales pitch is no good, which is why you’re losing them to these discounters. We have to overcome that challenge.
But what I want you to know from the start, if you’re saying part of the reason I don’t sell retail is there’s no money in it, there’s plenty of money in it. You just have to ask yourself “Is my markup high enough that I can actually be making a profit?”
Now, for those of you who work commissions and you’re like, “Well, my commission salon doesn’t offer retail commissions,” or maybe you’re a booth renter and you’re like, “My salon doesn’t offer retail commissions,” it’s likely because they have keystone markup and they can’t give you a piece of the profit because there is none, right? If they aren’t getting a profit, how can they possibly giving be giving you a piece? And so most salon owners who aren’t giving retail commissions aren’t being stingy or they’re not trying to reap all the benefits. They don’t have a profit and they can’t figure out why the money’s not there and I’m breaking it down for you right now. It’s just not available.
So when we are looking to up our retail game first, really look at that margin and ask yourself, “Is there enough to go around here or do I need to change the way I charge so that I can be making the profit that I need next?”
Next, when it comes to selling today, instant gratification is key. I always like to say, we’re living in an Amazon Prime kind of world. We’ve gotten used to if anything takes more than two days to get to us, we’re like losing our minds, right?
Remember when you used to order something—listen, if you’re a nineties kid like me or you were an eighties or a seventies or a sixties kid, you know, we used to order things from catalogs. So you would get the catalog. You’d circle the item that you want, or you’d fill out an order form. You’d mail the order form in somewhere. Some real life person would have to process it. When they said six to eight weeks for processing, they weren’t joking. You’d order something today. And it would take six to eight weeks to get to you, sometimes longer.
Now, if something takes more than two days, I’m not buying it from you. I’ll search around until I find that two-day shipping. Our attention spans have become short.
So when we say things like, “Instead of offering retail in my salon, I allow clients to order it and then it gets shipped right to their doorstep,” you have really lengthened the sales process. You have lost that sense of urgency and that excitement around the product already.
I know why you’re doing it. You’re like, “Well, it keeps my cost of inventory low and I don’t have to stock anything. It makes my life easier and clients like to purchase stuff online anyway.” Well, you can still have the best of both worlds with that online purchasing, but having the product in store, I promise you you’ll make more sales and you’ll make more money.
If you get me excited about something, I want to have it right now. I want to use it when I get home. I need to feel that kind of energy around it if you’re going to make the sale. Part of the reason why you’re losing sales is you get me so excited about a product and then I have to wait two to five days to have it. You’re already, “I’ll just go to Sephora at that point, I guess, because it doesn’t hardly matter. I’m going to wait either way. It doesn’t matter to me.”
Part of the urgency is you convince me I need something and I get to walk home with it in hand.
Now, primarily I’m an online shopper. I do a lot of my clothing shopping online. I happen to live in an area where to get to the closest shopping mall, it’s probably 35 minutes. It’s not super close and so ordering online is just more convenient. Often, however, sometimes my daughter and I will have a mother-daughter shopping date and we love going into the stores, finding an item, bringing it home, trying it on when we get home. What is all of that? That is an experience. That’s not just buying stuff to buy stuff. We’re creating an experience. You need to create a retail experience.
Ding! Did you just have a light bulb moment? Often when we are having a negative connotation or thought about retail in the salon, it’s because we’re thinking of it as, “Oh, it’s just shampoo. Oh, it’s just conditioner. Oh, people can just buy that wherever.” Yes. But they can’t have that level of experience through a computer screen. It’s impossible unless you’re just schlepping shampoo, then yes, that’s exactly what they can have. They can have that same experience anywhere. But if you are truly creating a sales experience, it has to be in-salon and you have to be able to have them walk out the doors with it.
I’m a huge fan of microneedling. I became obsessed with it. Michelle probably introduced me to it last year. I’m just in love and the woman could sell me $50 bottles of water at this point, whatever she says, I need, I’ll buy. First of all, I’m licensed, so some of what she offers to me, I could get at a professional discount, but I don’t because what she is selling to me, I want to have to use on my face tonight and tomorrow morning. I don’t want to wait. I don’t. I could be lovely to Michelle, which shoutout to my girl, I do love her, and I could say, “Oh, the reason I buy my skincare from her is ‘cause I care for her as a person,” which I do. However, the reason why she gets me to buy is ‘cause it’s so urgent for me, I can’t wait. I don’t want to wait. And it’s because of the sales experience provided.
That’s what you need to be offering.
Part of it is you need to have a retail line that’s experiential. Start asking yourself, “Do I have a retail line that I can create an experience around? Do I have a retail line that I’m super passionate about? Is this something I can double down on?”
Now I’m going to give a shameless plug right now and this brand that I’m going to mention did not pay to be on the podcast. I’m mentioning them because I really believe in what they do and what they offer and the way they show up. And maybe this is not the only brand that shows up this way, but it’s the only brand that’s recently given me a hair care experience that blew my mind, and that brand is Innersense.
I was invited to speak at their event in January. That’s really the first place I connected with them. They still have yet to this day to send me free products. Everything I’ve used, I’ve actually bought. Actually, that’s a lie. They gave me one free product when I went to their event in January and it changed everything for me. And what changed everything for me was the way that I watched them care very deeply about the stylists that were in that room, listened to their feedback, changed their products because of what they were hearing. I became a believer when I tried one of the products on myself and it completely changed my hair. And then I started looking into Innersense and they have these hair rituals and there’s a different way that you use the products and it is this entire experience.
And you know what, I thought to myself, I see the world in sales opportunity and I see the world in marketing and I said, “Oh my gosh, this is something that could be transformational for a stylist or a salon.” I immediately saw it because it is so incredibly different experience-wise. It’s also clean beauty. They have all of these other things going for them, but the way that they have framed the product is incredibly unique.
The other thing that I love about Innersense feeds into the next point I’m going to make, which is sell less, better. You don’t need to have 50 SKUs, 50 different pieces of hair care in your salon, in your studio suite, whatever in order to be successful at retail. In fact, a lot of people make more money with 12 strong products than a full range of 50.
Honestly, because for most of you, you don’t, you couldn’t even master 50 products if you wanted to, nor do you need to. You need a good handful that fit in line with your specialty and the less choices and options you have for your clientele, actually, the greater chances are that you’ll sell because it looks like you have a strong point of view.
When I go into a salon and it looks like a beauty supply store and there’s two or three different kinds of moisturizing shampoo, or even if there’s seven different types of shampoo at all, it starts to become really confusing. Three different hairsprays light hold, medium hold, heavy hold. How many of your clients really need heavy hold hairspray, like legit, I’m asking. If you’re like, “Well, a lot of them,” okay, perfect. So that might be your specialty.
How many of your clients then need a light hold hairspray? If a ton of your clients need heavy hold, how many of them really need light hold? Really start asking yourself.
One of the best things you can do if you want to increase your retail sales strategy—and I teach this in Retail Therapy—is we talk about how to look at our quarterly retail sales. When we’re doing our inventory, which you should be doing quarterly retail inventory, there’s a huge tax perk to it. As we’re doing that, we’re analyzing our SKUs and we’re renegotiating how many of each we need to have in the salon.
Order to fill died. Let’s leave that in 1993. Order to fill is “I sell one bottle of moisture shampoo. I buy another one to stock my shelf. I sell six bottles of thermal protectant. I buy six more next week to restock my shelf.” That’s called order to fill. That is very dated. That’s not the way we run business today.
Instead we actually look at sales volume. We look at sales percentage. We say, “Listen, is it just that last week I happen to have the six guests who like that shampoo in my salon or do I really sell through six a week every single week?” and starting to look at the trends of your business. That’s how you’re going to start making retail purchases smart.
Now what you’re going to find is that probably about if you currently have a large range, like let’s say 30 products, you’ll find that there’s probably seven or eight that sell really well, and the rest is just little bits here and there. Every single time, 25 to 30% of a range will sell really, really well, and the rest just does okay.
Now, if you have a smaller range, you can sell through like 70, 80%, and that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking to have that strong turn. Do y’all know that a lot of hair care products expire within six months, 12 months, 18 months at best. They don’t last forever. So when you have products that are sitting on your shelf for months and months and months, they can go rancid or they can lose their potency, and then when your client says, “Well, this didn’t work for me, it’s like, “Well, yeah, because it’s expired. I sold you expired product,” and then we can’t be surprised, right?
Really looking at what you offer and saying, “Do I have a range that requires me to hold everything, to keep all these products?” Or do you have a more modern range? Something like an Innersense where you can just pick and choose what works for your brand, pick and choose what works for your salon, right?
So I want you to, if you’re carrying retail, open your mind. A lot of the old school distribution where it was like you take the whole range or you’re out of here, you meet this certain set of criteria or we don’t want you, that’s very dated. And there’s a lot of innovative brands out there who are offering much better opportunity. I want you to be eyes wide open and really ask yourself, am I going with what’s easy? Or am I choosing the brand that’s in alignment with my values and gives me the best opportunity to make a sale because it’s truly an experience. Something to think about.
Now, last as we get into your sales technique, I never want you to sell a product again, ever. Don’t sell a product. Don’t sell me on the benefits of a product. Don’t sell me on why I need a product. Sell me on a transformation, understand my problems, create solutions for me. Sell me on the process, not the product, ‘cause here’s the thing: nobody wants another product. If I looked in my bathroom right now, I would tell you, “Friend. I do not need any more products. I have plenty of hair care. I have more skincare than I know what to do with.” But if my Michelle tells me about a process that’s going to be beneficial to me, yes, just add it to my bag. Yes. It’s just a yes. Even though I don’t need another product, I always seek a better result. And if you can sell me on the process, that will get me that result. There’s not a question as if I’m going to say yes or say no.
Really rethink that opportunity. Really rethink how you’re positioning those retail sales and what might work better for you.
Y’all, if you have more retail questions and you want me to dive deeper into this, leaving me a rating or a review on iTunes, let me know what questions have come up for you, and we can dive a little bit deeper. Now, as I always like to say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
