Hairdressing salon

This section is about running a hairdressing salon: about appointments that hold, clients who come back, and the half hour a day that disappears between a call, a call back and the appointment book. It is written for owners of small and mid-sized salons, for whoever leads the team, and for anyone renting a chair or working self-employed on one.

The most common questions are questions about time. How long does a colour really take once the development time sits in the middle of it, and what happens on the second chair during that gap? How much slack does a day take before it tips, and at what point does slack make it uneconomic? Out of those answers comes a service menu that names not only prices but durations that hold up in the calendar.

The second big question is return. A salon does not live on new faces but on the rhythm of familiar ones: four to six weeks on a regrowth, six to eight on a short cut, considerably longer for anything meant to grow out gently. Know that rhythm per service and you have to advertise less and remind more. The same group holds the articles on client notes, on formulas and preferences, and on handling cancellations.

Then there are the subjects nobody opens voluntarily and every business meets anyway: hygiene and the records that go with it, holding client data, consent for photographs, complaints after a colour. They appear here not as legal text but as a description of what is workable in a salon day.

Two neighbouring subjects sit deliberately elsewhere. Anything that only concerns a barbershop — beard services, walk-ins, short turnarounds — is in the barbershop section. And the question of which system you run and how you introduce it is a software question; it sits under salon software. This section is about the craft and the business around it.