7 Tips to Save Money for Your Salon during a Recession (or to Offset Inflation)

Recently, as many top tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon started laying off employees, plus the Fed has been increasing intertest rate for 6 times ever since March 2022, the concern and fear of the recession or business slowdown is in the air. Some top finance experts have predicted a recession by the end of 2022 to a 50-50 chance of a recession in 2023 to a “mild” recession come 2024. 

With the recession and inflation coming in hand in hand, it’s never a bad idea to check on your financial status and come up a recession-proof strategy for your salon business.

As a leading salon equipment and furnishing platform, ShopSalonCity.com believes in your success will be our success, and we wish we can support each other to come through this hard time.

Here we gathered 7 Tips from our salon experts to help you save money and manage your finances during a recession or to offset the inflation.   

1) Save money on salon equipment purchase.

Save Money Tips for Nail Salons:

In northern states, winter is the slowest season for pedicure business. Don't feel sad about that, it is an actually perfect timing to remodel your salon and make it ready for the peak season when spring is back. 

For the remodeling, you might want to upgrade your pedicure chairs. So here comes our Saving Money Tip 1 -  refresh your salon look with new cover set cushions instead of buying the high ticket full function pedicure chairs. This tip can easily save your budget by 10 times from $2000-3000 per pedicure chair to $200 per cover set.

Shiatsulogic LX Cover Set $235	Perla LX Pedicure Chair $2,458

Save Money Tips for Barbershops and Hair Salons: 

Saving Money Tip 2 - find great deals during holiday season. This is an obvious one, during the holiday seasons, there're plenty of great deals from both online ecommerce sellers and brick-and-mortar retail stores. So, don't miss this best opportunity of the year to equip your salon. For example, at Shop Salon City, you can easily find some high reputation barber chairs with a budget only around $500.   

Rowling Barber Chair $545	King Barber Chair (Brown)  $599

Saving Money Tip 3 - use all-purpose chair instead of barber chair for a startup salon. If you are considering opening up your own business in a salon suite or you are at other business phases but tight on budget, it is always a good idea to use an all purpose chair to provide both barber and hair styling services to your clients. The all-purpose chairs have all the features for any hair services: it can recline, rotate, easy lift-up and space-friendly, while only needs 1/3 to 1/2 of the price of a bulky barber chair. 

Herman All Purpose Chair $388	Madison Barber Chair $1124

Saving Money Tip 4 - shampoo cabinet is a great replacement of backwash unit. Comparing to a $1000 shampoo backwash unit, a $200 - $300 shampoo bowl cabinet is more friendly for a small-budget and small-space salon. You can pair it up with any chair that you have to provide hair wash service to your clients, and moreover, it comes with the cabinet which provides ample storage room that a shampoo backwash unit doesn't have. 

Sanden II Shampoo Cabinet Set $249	Nautilus Backwash Unit $1149

Saving Money Tip 4 - use home/office cabinets as styling stations. Professional styling stations are usually quite pricey, but if you can be creative and switch to those universal cabinets, a new world will open up for you. You can save a ton of money by purchasing the cabinet and the mirror separately at any home and office supplier place.

Look at this Acadian Storage Cabinet which is only priced at $352 on Home Depot website versus the Vault Styling Station at a professional salon equipment site at $1125. 

Acadian Storage Cabinet $352	Vault Styling Station $1125

Furthermore, our customer Modern Image Barber & Stylist can bring you more inspiration with their lifestyle setup:  

2) Smartly use financing services.

It is always a big challenge for all types of salon businesses on financing. We have seen so many new salons cannot get their financing application approved due to too short credit history or low credit scores, plus the current interest rate is skyrocketed, financing has become extreme expensive to the businesses. With current market situation, everyone are more towards the saving mode and becoming super cautious on borrowing money. 

Our Saving Money Tip 5 is from our lease-to-own financing partner SNAP. 

Firstly, if you have difficulty to get a loan approved from traditional financing companies, try Snap. As an innovative lease-to-own fintech company, Snap Finance empowers credit-challenged shoppers with the buying power to get what they need. Your approval chance with Snap is as high as over 80% and the whole process only needs less than 10 seconds. 

Secondly, Snap has an excellent 100-Day Option, say, if you can pay off your loan within the first 100 days, you can avoid paying the high interest rate for a longer term and only pay a very little lease fee. 

Now, ShopSalonCity.com has fully integrated with Snap, to apply for Snap Finance, you can simply checkout with the Snap option from your shopping cart if your loan amount is under $5000. 

3) When the business is slow, invest in yourself and your employees. 

Instead of spending a fortune on hardware and salon decorations, during the slowdown phase of the market, our Saving Money Tip 6 is to invest in your own and your employee's soft skills. 

Thanks to the internet and the digital era, we have so many ways to improve ourselves now. Learning has never been so accessible, so flexible, and so affordable. There're so many online courses available that you can study at any time with a minimal expense or even for free. 

As a business owner, you must have already been an expert in your professional area, but managing a salon is more than that. Besides providing the nail/hair/spa/tattoo services to your clients, you also need to learn accounting and financing basics, people management, as well as getting yourself kick-off on digital marketing to learn how to use Google and mainstream social media platforms to drive more traffic to your salon.  

As for your employees, when business is slow, it's always great to encourage them to learn some new skills, either it is a trendy nail art, a creative tattoo design, or a new hair style.

It's also good to spend more time to enhance communications with your clients - you can share with them some life stories, some new design of nail art, or simply send holiday greetings, so as to increase the bonding with your customers and make them your lifetime friends. Therefore, they would like to keep supporting you when you suffer from the economy, and come back more to your shop when things get better. 

4) Expand to more services to attract more clients.

Saving Money Tip 7 - Finding a second source of income is a great idea whether you are an individual employee or a business. 

Let's say you are in the nail business now, think about what kind of other service you can offer to your current customers? How about adding some simple spa and massage options?

If you focused on pure hair cut service before, how about also providing your customer a hair care therapy for damaged hair and dry hair in winter? 

If you were in the massage business, the new trendy and profitable opportunities can be offering eyelash extensions and event makeups.

Alright, you might say I don't have the skills to expand to a new business area yet, then let's go back to 3) in this article - this is the perfect time for us to learn!  

To wrap up, there're a lot for us to do during times good and bad. Please always feel positive and take smart and proactive actions!