If business is slower than usual, it's a good time to do the salon renovation you've been planning. Labor and material costs are currently low. And the potential return on the investment in a salon renovation is high if you reinvent your salon to meet new health and sanitation standards.
Salons with the following three upgrades to your salon equipment can assuage client health and safety concerns, and become a model for new sanitation standards for the industry.
Space Out Salon Stations
Salons paying high rents for an upmarket location have hairdressers working elbow-to-elbow to increase their revenue per square foot. In the age of social distancing, though, every second or third chair is empty. While redesigning your salon, your first priority should be spacing out salon and shampooing stations.
You likely will need to be creative to retain the same number of productive salon stations. Here are a few design ideas:
- Open up unused storage and other dead spaces to increase your hair station space.
- Place a partial wall in the middle of the space and situate hair stations on both sides of the wall.
- If you have high ceilings, add one or more lofts, which can be used as an alternative storage space; or for hairstyling, coloring, or shampooing stations.
Better Salon Chairs
Once in your newly spaced out chairs, clients are more sensitive to being touched and they certainly abhor the thought of being breathed on. While redesigning your space, consider adopting new protocols for interacting with the client.
Ergonomically correct chairs for social distancing can significantly reduce the amount of human-to-human contact. When shopping for new chairs, consider chairs with:
- head and neck rests to reduce the amount of contact (for example, the need to turn and hold the client's head in place)
- remote height adjustment on hair and shampooing chairs
- good suspension to smoothly turn/swivel the chair.
Safer Salon Equipment
More professional salons are adopting medical equipment safety standards. These safety measures involve using tools with strong anti-bacterial and anti-fungicidal protection. To meet medical standards, salons are moving towards the use of all stainless steel tools. They include stainless steel:
- brushes and combs
- hair clips and ties
- bowls and wisps to mix hair colors
- manicure tools
By adding advanced sterilization methods, you can upgrade your salon to a new level of professionalism. Sterilizing salon equipment with UV light cabinets after each hairstyle or manicure service eliminates bacteria. Your clients will use your services with complete confidence when they know all salon equipment is being UV sterilized.
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