“Seeing the value in colour… By God that has changed everything!”

With salons in Nottingham and Derby, Tuckwell & Co’s Simon Tuckwell was keen to nail how his teams were pricing colour with an eye on growing profits. A bit less squeezing has been a lot more pleasing…

SimonTuckwell

I looked at my numbers, and something wasn’t quite adding up. We seemed to be spending a lot on colour but it didn’t seem to be going into the right place. I’d spoken to colour management software Vish four years ago, and decided to have another conversation. If anyone asks me my biggest regret, I will say not going with Vish back then, because it makes you see down to the gram what was being used on clients.

Once it was in place, I said to the team: ‘If you just do this for 30 days – your normal routine, the normal amount you would mix up – we’ll have some real figures. If it doesn't work, I won’t make us do that again’. They all got on board, and it gave us a baseline. Then we had clients coming back 30 days, six weeks, eight weeks later, and our data got more accurate. From our original data, per client we were using between 150g and 200g of colour. Over the past six months we’ve now got that down to 80g per client, which is huge. But we’re not scrimping, the client isn’t getting less of an experience. We realised too much was getting mixed up, and then going down the sink. About 99 per cent of all client bowls get reweighed now, so we know that our data is accurate.

If you do end up over mixing, we’re not going to send you to the back of the salon with no dinner! We’re a little forgiving, we allow 100g of colour for an average application, whether that be a root tint or full head, and then it’s slightly more for balayage and highlights. But a toner is then measured separately. Anything over that, we then charge per gram for the client, and this is all discussed beforehand. There are no surprises at the till.

For example, another big change was charging correctly for toners. As a salon, it was important to educate both ourselves and our clients on what a toner is for and what it can create. Toners have changed massively in the past 10 years and our understanding needed to change; it isn’t just about putting a small amount of colour over some highlights to blend now; they’re pretty much full colour services and needed to be priced as such.

Our colour bar sits in the middle of the salon – front and centre, not down in a dungeon – where we have five iPads, all with Vish. It looks great to clients, and helps when having that conversation. They feel like you’re not just making prices up, they can see how it all comes together. I want them to see we use 20g of this, 10g of that, it’s all part of that conversation… and it’s a little bit of theatre as well! It’s been helpful for the stylists, seeing the value in the colour. By God that has changed everything – I now have about 48 little salon owners keeping an eye! The biggest change is that I use data now, not emotion. I used to emotionally discount everybody! I still work behind the chair five or six days a week, so if I’m behaving the right way, I’m showing that to my team. And they’re seeing the benefit, there’s more budget to go on nights out and on education. So, it’s investing that money straight back into our colour but without just spending it on tubes of colour. I’ve got two stylists doing the Wella Colour Expert programme, and I’m completing the Wella Higher Level Diploma.

From the eco point of view, we’re not just mixing up loads of colour and then washing it down the drain. Wastage is down to about 8 per cent, whereas we were looking at 70 per cent on some days. I’m not a numbers person, but I’ve come to love them. We use Phorest Salon Software, which aligns with Vish, and it makes it so easy to understand those numbers. Running a salon is hard enough at the minute, why not have something that just makes your life so much easier?