Beauty studio at your home

Beauty-uberization

Traditional beauty studios keep being under pressure of administrative restrictions: there are high risks of a complete ban on work due to the upcoming «second wave» of the pandemic.

At the same time, the service sector when beauty masters coming to an apartment or an office continues its natural development. This format of work has quite good prospects, you just need to organize a convenient process of interaction with clients.

It is interesting that the beauty industry stubbornly avoids uberization. For example, when ordering a car became available through a mobile app, in 5 years everyone without exception started using it. It took less than 2 years for the medical services market.

We are going go tell you about all of the two concepts of the mobile beauty studios.

Beauty specialist at your place

The first option is to call a master at home or in the office. The house-call service was offered by advanced beauty salons long before the restrictions associated with COVID-19, but it was the pandemic that spurred the active spreading of this format of work.

Analyzing the prospects of such business makes it clear that it has significantly more advantages compared to traditional beauty salons:

Firstly, mobile beauty salons don’t pay rent. This allows them to offer more flexible rates for their services. Even after the aggregator has deducted the commission, which, following the example of the taxi market, may in the future reach 15-20% of the customer’s check, all participants in the service delivery chain will receive an acceptable margin, and the price in mobile beauty salons will be quite affordable for most customers.

Secondly, this service delivery format implies scheduled workload, which is very convenient for business owners when assessing work efficiency. Impulsive demand has almost no effect on revenues for mobile beauty salons.

Mobile beauty studios are focused on clients who prefer planning. They make appointments just like in traditional beauty studios, but the difference is that clients don’t have to go to anywhere, because the beauty masters come to them.

Thirdly, conducting a relationship with clients through a mobile app, the business gets great opportunities to individualize and personalize their service. The access to personal customer data and the power of deep analytics of customer requests makes price forming available according to the individual consumer segments, depending on the set of services the consumer uses.

Fourthly, the mobile service format assumes that additional services can be offered to the client via in-app notifications. This will even meet the new requirements of the service enterprises supervisory organizations, which require serving clients only by appointment. This is a great help to entrepreneurs in terms of possible fiscal inspections.

Fifthly, to organize the mobile beauty salon work, you do not have to keep masters «on the staff». Beauty industry professionals become self-employed, just like taxi drivers who receive customer orders from an aggregator company. Competition is determined by the geography of the master and his rating in the it system.

And the benefits don’t end there. From the point of view of consumers this format of work of beauty salons is very convenient. People are now too busy to get a haircut, visit the dentist, or perform other tasks, creating a new market for mobile businesses focused solely on providing «on-the-go» services.

Beauty and digital

The number of home service offers on social media is overwhelming. Finding an onsite hairdresser on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram is really easy.

The mobile beauty salons offer the same services as the traditional ones: haircut, styling, hair coloring, nail service, cosmetology services and massage. A beauty master with the necessary set of equipment is ready to come to the client’s home or office, even by public transport. Cars with a beauty master sticker on the rear window can be found not only in large cities.

Advertising for mobile beauty professionals is also concentrated on social media, especially on Instagram.

SMM will remain the main channel of promotion in the beauty industry for a long time, allowing establishing and maintaining direct online communication between the specialist and the client. For this purpose, almost every specialist account offers operational communication via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Telegram messengers in addition to personal messages.

But a special mobile app offers modern promotional tools in addition to the possibility of booking an appointment and messaging customers. For example, promotions with discounts on certain services that are saved in the profile of loyal customers and activated via a QR code.

The advantages of the mobile app are that the client binds a Bank card and immediately pays for the service.

The rating system will allow you to know the level of client confidence in the specialist you are inviting in advance.

The Hair Truck

The Hair Truck beauty salon on the wheels, founded in 2016 by Polish hairdressers Anija and Tomek Shabelka with generous support from the Polish Distributor A&M Premium Distribution, became the first mobile hairdressing salon KEVIN.MURPHY  in Poland.

One of the “tricks” of Hair Truck is that all the money earned from the services of mobile hairdressers is donated to charity.

The beauty truck is a fashion trend that is actively gaining momentum around the world. If we recall the dynamics of the food truck market, which a couple of years ago were fashionable exotic, the sector of beauty salons in specially converted minibuses has good prospects.

The mobile services trend is becoming global. Beauty trucks appear in different parts of the world — in both parts of America, Eastern and Western Europe, Asia.

Mobile beauty salons were invented even earlier than the XXI century. The format of beauty services «onsite» is similar to the appearance of vehicles on the roads. And not only cars.

At Rustega’ 2013, the mobile bike barbershop Arzantie Pimpilli, which worked on the streets of Florence at the beginning of the last century was shown.

The XXI century added charm to the design of beauty cars. Although, some specialists do not even invest much in the re-equipment of their mobile establishments. Such formats are found only in the warm season.

For example, Barbershop van Dam from the Netherlands, shearing visitors of various summer festivals.

But to serve visitors at any time of the year, you will need the most powerful equipment of a mobile beauty studio, including high-quality workplace equipment, as well as air conditioning, electricity and water supply.

Vintage minibuses, trailers and trucks are transformed into mobile beauty salons, and the resulting objects are a real work of art.

For example, Beauty Truck, founded by entrepreneur Andrea Paola Rosal from Guatemala. The Beauty Truck is focused on serving events, parties and important family events such as weddings. The owner admits that the Beauty Truck clients are completely diverse, including even children. Therefore, the set of services has constantly been updated to match the usual salon-hair salon as much as possible.

Miniature beauty salon in the La Coquette mobile trailer from France, offering manicure, makeup and hair services, serving weddings and parties in Bordeaux.

The specialized mobile beauty studios feel comfortable at the market. For example, The Nail Truck , based in Newport beach, California, offers just two services-manicures and pedicures.

Its owner, Janine Allen, is focused on housewives with children and busy ladies who can get to the nail salon between business meetings or at lunch, so that they do not waste time on the road, because The Nail Truck will come to them.

Pink beauty trucks are the dream of both visitors and their owners. Fashionable mobile beauty salons can be found on the streets of some cities, for example, in Paris.

There is also a mobile nail beauty track La Laqueria, launched in 2014 in San Francisco by Susan Flag, a former investment banker. For the sake of a new business, Susan not only gave up a stable job in Finance, but also graduated from beauty school, receiving a license as a manicure master. Getting started in mobile format in the US was not easy. But for 5 years of existence, La Lacquerie feels great and plans to expand the range of services, offering clients waxing and massage.

In Montreal, visitors are hosted by the La Rousse Mobile beauty salon. Plying at designated stops, the beauty trail is equipped with three hairdressing chairs, one make-up area and two manicure tables.

Jackie Naylor from Bolton has transformed a Volkswagen Crafter van into a self-contained luxury treatment room. Beauty On Wheels offers an onsite treatment room with massage bed, hot and cold water, heating, sockets and lights.

Colvon Mobile Nail Salon by Emilia Christina or Spa Truck by Jillian Dilts from Georgia based on a vintage 1962 Airstream and many, many others.

Mobile hair beauty studios that serve no only women appear too. Bar Dy Barbershop-a two-person barbershop converted from an Isuzu QKR 270 truck, cuts men’s hair on the streets of Ho Chi Minh city. The concept focuses not only on the fashionable middle-class representatives of the metropolis of Vietnam, but it also travels to remote cities to provide high-quality hairdressing services to residents of less affluent areas.

Benny’s Barbershop mobile will come to you in New Zealand. A manly network of men’s hairdressers has equipped an autotrailer for a mobile Barber shop.

Australian beauty Studio TAFE SA suggested a different scheme of work. Mobile beauty salon Hair and Beauty offers…training in hairdressing, beauty and makeup throughout the region. More than 200 people are trained weekly across South Australia. A very successful reprieve from competitors in the rapidly developing mobile segment.

New perspectives

What will particularly please the participants of the beauty market, is the high willingness of consumers to receive beauty services in a mobile format.The only difficulty for a visiting specialist is that they will have to interest the clients, who most of the time already have «their own beauty specialist».

The beauty market remains conservative and quite a large part of the clients of beauty services (66%), in principle, are not willing to experiment.Time will tell whether the attitude of such skeptics to the use of beauty services in mobile format will change in the future.

Beauty industry companies that are able to integrate new formats of customer service into their business processes will ultimately remain the winners in the market.