Expansion Of The Beauty Salon And Day Spa Industry Approach
With the explosion of the multi-billion dollar beauty industry there seems to be a trend developing. Businesses are starting to blur the lines between a salon and spa.
What used to be sub specialties of both the salon and spa businesses, are now being seen in so called one stop shopping locations for lovers of pampering and beauty services in general.
Some of the beauty product retailers have full hair salons and nail salons inside their stores. I’m sure it won’t be long before they start to add the spa services as well. It reminds me a lot of what happened in the automotive maintenance industry.
Formerly, the stand alone 30 minute oil change service centers quickly added tire service to their offerings. It soon became clear that in order to compete in this market, more and more services had to be added in order to increase the slim profits made from the oil and tires. Soon these businesses were offering full fledged auto repair.
The beauty and health industry is basically following the same trend as far as offering more and better services. As costs went up and profit margins thinned, they had to come up with ways to fatten the bottom line.
The logical choice is to expand in other areas of the beauty industry. These businesses have eliminated the distinction between a salon and spa. Spas today offer traditional salon service and salons have added traditional spa services. Soon we will have mega-beauty complexes where you can get your hair, nails, massages, facials, makeup, tanning, waxing and any other beauty service you can think of.
I don’t think we’ll go as far as offering drive through services at these mega centers, but who knows! And some of the smaller beauty shop businesses will have to start diversifying into certain niches to survive, because most of these smaller outfits are the owner-operator types of stores.
They would rather just do what they do and not have to worry about the details and headaches of running a business. It is a mindset thing. The problem is that they don’t want to give up the freedom that being your own boss yields. I see a niche developing in salon and spa businesses.