Portraits of Success: Technology
Hair color is the salon’s mightiest profit engine, generating the highest tickets, the highest rates of service frequency and the best way to leverage additional services and retail sales. But two key aspects of hair color can be complete profit blockers—hair color waste and failing to charge for all color services performed. Here’s how three salons discovered VISH—an easy new software system designed to slash color waste and revenue loss—and shifted their biggest pain points to profitability.
Nadia Duncan, Posh Salon, Williamsburg, VA: A 21 Percent Reduction in Monthly Color Waste
The owner of this award-winning Aveda salon has a keen interest in cost savings and inventory efficiencies. So when she and her husband came across a Vish ambassador demo-ing the system on Facebook, she signed up then and there. The Duncans briefed the team of 29 Posh employees in the salon’s monthly staff meeting, explaining the considerable cost benefits of reducing color waste. Then they arranged for members of the Vish team to come in and train the team. “Having the Vish team onsite during business hours to help with process integration and onsite troubleshooting was essential,” says Nadia. “It was so helpful to have them educating us while clients were processing.”
She says the learning curve wasn’t steep, because the graphic interface and interactive nature of formulation makes Vish so easy to learn. And the results have been beyond her wildest dreams. In just 90 days after implementing Vish, Posh’s average monthly waste dropped to 5 percent from 26 percent! The highest month of waste cost the salon $1,756.00 before Vish; after Vish, waste was reduced to just $284.25 per month.
Needless to say, Nadia is thrilled with the results, and the benefits go beyond savings. “When I was off work for maternity leave, no one called me asking for a formula because it was all in the Vish system,” says Nadia. “We love how it tracks the amount of color we use, so when the client returns it has already calculated the precise amount of color we need for her hair. As a salon owner it has been an invaluable tool for inventory management and waste reduction. Vish is a young company and we are proud to be part of their growth. We can’t wait to see what they come up with next!”
Heath Smith, Ruiz Salon, Austin, TX: Ready for a Complete Color System Overhaul
As Ruiz Salon’s co-founder and director of operations, Heath Smith is always on the lookout for smarter, more efficient ways to do business. And he admits it’s not easy to find solutions. “Our industry’s systems and processes for managing inventory, color and color-related services are completely antiquated,” he observes. Until now. “Vish allows us to track inventory in real time and manage hair color on a per service basis,” Heath says. “It allows for a pricing model that reflects actual usage and application techniques. It also closes the communication gap between the technical team and the guest care team, ensuring customers pay for the services delivered. Also, Vish tracks usage and most importantly, the mixed but unused hair color and then automatically adjusts the guest’s formula for the next visit, thereby eliminating over-mixing and waste.”
Heath says the Vish system has provided such deep insights into color usage, it has launched him on a mission to re-evaluate the salon’s color menu and pricing model. And he has discovered many more applications. “Vish will allow us to audit our color tickets and compare to our point of sale software, giving us insight into actual customer billing,” he says. “We anticipate this will eliminate color services that aren’t charged for. We also added our professional treatments to the system and are tracking the cost and value of these services. Ultimately, if we could see even small improvements in color waste, inventory control, application techniques, pricing, correct service charging and eliminating careless loss, the impact of Vish software will be priceless for our company. Even at this stage, we are incredibly happy!”
Jordon Knicley—Sagittarius Salon & Spa, Hagerstown, MD: Staff Buy-In is Easy and Effective
At Sagittarius, the pace is fast and color accounts for 80 percent of the services performed by the staff of 32. So introducing a new system that requires used color bowls to be re-weighed was risky. But Jordon Knicley was determined to implement the Vish system. “We’ve worked with a business coach for five years,” she says, “and we’re always looking at ways to improve our numbers. We were doing everything the coach was telling us to do but we still had a challenge with backbar waste.” After a call with a representative from Vish, she realized she had found a solution. And she knew she needed complete buy-in from the team.
The key to success, she reveals, was on-site training. “Because our staff is so large, we brought a Vish representative into the salon for a two-day training. Everyone got one-on-one time with him and was able to ask questions.” As a result, the onboarding was painless. “Even stylists who have been with us 25 years caught on immediately,” Jordon reveals. “To use Vish, you formulate on a scale that’s connected to an iPad. After the service, you re-weigh the bowl. That’s critical because if there is any color left over, it will deduct the amount from the client’s formula and file the data. The re-weighing is the only way to protect your inventory, and within one month, our re-weighing rate was at 99 percent!”
Jordon looked for ways to make it easy for the staff to re-weigh their bowls. “They can have an assistant do it,” she says, “or they can stack up the bowls and do them at the end of the day. And the win for doing so is crystal clear—the less money we spend on backbar, the more we can allot for staff bonuses. Not to mention the fact that in our salon, there is no option. I told them all this is what we’re doing. And after just a few months, we’re already ordering 40 percent less color!”