29th April 2025
If you are serious about retailing in your salon environment, and let’s be absolutely honest here, if you care about your clients hair, then you really should be, now is the time to start embracing the changes happening throughout the world of consumers and shopping.
Your salon is a shop, you sell stuff! You sell cuts, colours, curling, having, styling, extensions, add on services; perhaps you also have additional things that are sold, nails and brows etc, and you also SELL YOUR TEAM AND THEIR EXPERTISE.
Your team, likewise, sell themselves and the services available with every client each and every day.
And yet retail, for some reason, quite often seems to be left out of the equation. My belief is that it’s because talking about retail feels like ‘selling’ whereas discussing salon services is all about the ‘telling’, a completely different approach.
But consumers of today want more than to be told about products (and services) they want experiences. Experiential shopping is the way forward, get it right and retail products can sell themselves.
Experiential shopping is all about affecting the senses, creating an atmosphere where consumers (your clients) feel comfortable picking up product, testing it, asking questions, reading information and reviews, discovering everything about products they are potentially going to buy.
This is what happens in big stores and chemists, and it’s something that cannot happen with online shopping, but it can happen in the salon.
What do you need to do to make your environment experiential?
1: TOUCH*: The more tactile the retail environment, the better, your clients need to know that it’s okay to pick the product up off the shelf and read the information whilst (subconsciously) feeling the quality of the packaging. *If you provide testers, and you really should, make sure you have wet wipes so clients cans clean their hands after trying any product.
2: SIGHT: Retail stands and ares where retail can be placed throughout the salon have to be multi-faceted, with imagery, tablets, price point signs, leaflets, QR codes, everything to keep the client interested.
3: HEARING: Using a table that ‘talks’ as the consumer is looking at the products adds a new dimension to the shopping experience, something is talking about the benefits, without it being an annoying salesperson trying to sell sell sell. This subtle messaging approach is then strengthened by the conversation between stylist and client. The hearing is a metaphor for the table that talks – check out Anthropologie or Oliver Bonas and analyse what the retail says in their multi faceted display areas.
4: SMELL: We will all recognise in ourselves that when we pick up a product, no matter where we are, one of the first things we do is open up the lid and have a smell, the fragrance, whilst not important to the function of a product is still a very necessary factor. Smell is so important that Abercrombie & Fitch flood their stories with their classic fragrance ‘Fierce’ and supermarkets always have the aroma of fresh bread as you walk around the store.
Salons need to change to accommodate experiential moments, that doesn’t mean knocking down walls and installing expensive kit, it simply means looking at retail spaces and making them more approachable and interactive. Your clients want to feel the product, check the fragrance, read information, be it on a tablet or on a notice. They want to feel like they are buying in to something special.
Make these changes and your team will reap the benefits and the subliminal messages will have worked their magic, all it takes after that is for the clients expert in all things hair – your stylists to explain why they choose what they use on their hair and why it is beneficial to use the same at home.
#SalonPro #SalonRetail #ProForPro
