Honeyrose29

I am looking to do something on my own that I am interested in. I would love to open a small salon.

My area only has 3 salons within 2 towns (pop. around 20,000 for both towns combined) and they are the small privately owned kind. 2 of them are within beauty salons and only have a few beds each, the other is a small salon with 5 beds/no upgrades.. so I think it could be a good business move.

I have been eyeing some rental units, especially in a new development area/high traffic and they seem quite reasonable.

A few questions to anyone who can offer advice...
1. Where to go to purchase beds/booths and How many would be good to start with?

2. How to compete with the nearest 'chain' salon (the one I use. lol) which is 15 miles away. They offer unlimited tanning (1 tan per day) for less than 25$ a month. They have 16 booths total.. 2 levels of upgrades.

3. Where to get as much info as possible on every aspect of tanning/salons/beds/lotions/lamps
before jumping into this?

This board is a great start. I want to learn all I can before deciding if this is right for me.
Thanks in advance for your help.

staticHnTLounge

Use the Search tool on this website....many of the questions you are asking can be answered there. Good luck, and keep researching.:

Ezliving_Jim

Ideas are not toys. Be careful. You might hurt yourself.

Honeyrose29

Thanks staticHnTLounge. I have been searching here and have found a lot of valuable information. It is a big step and I want to be sure that I am well-informed. My husband has owned his own business for 10 yrs so I am familiar with a lot of the tax laws and such. I just need to get more specific info to this industry. Thanks again!

RockinAR

Just buy mine and take me out of my misery.

soapking

There are many bed manufacturers and as many distributors. Like any business, some work with ethics, some not. You will ask 20 salon owners a question; expect 25 different answers.
How much cash on hand to approach this, depends on quality of equipment, which resuls in quality of service. We all have our favorite bed manufacturers. In a town as you describe this is what I would consider: http://www.sundash.com
http://www.auvl.com
http://www.sontegra.com
http://www.etstan.com
http://www.heartlandtan.com

The best for the money and service would be Sontegra..AUVL would be too epensive for a small town, but without doubt, you will bury the competition. ETS is a company who had always been looked down on. They are the BEST American company around, as long as you stay with beds above 32lamps..Heartland is another quality company..go to their respective site, request info.It is all free...visit other on-line sites to learn more. http://www.tanningdivas.com
http://www.tanformation.com
You may want to add airbrush tans and tattoos. Very easy to learn and apply; http://www.sunless.com

It would be very hard to find a leasing company willing to lease cash for beds, if you have less than 2yrs in the business. A real catch-22. They would do it, but interest would be 25-31%. So, you need to find a company that offers in-house financing. ETS and Sundash-Ergoline do. So, unless you have deep pockets, or a good loan, you may want to check these out. As an upstart, leasing may be your best bet.

_Here is a suggestion. Go/call www.islandsuntimes.com This is an industry magazine. Ask if they will send you the "'04 Buyers Guide" which is the January 04 issue. It has a great deal of info on beds etc..a great place to start.______________


[ This Message was edited by: soapking on 2004-02-17 03:29 ][ This Message was edited by: soapking on 2004-02-17 04:18 ]

Honeyrose29

Thanks so much soapking!!

unity

I guess the advice I can add is to purchase enough beds to get you started, enough to do well and not to little you can not afford to purchase more later on. But have rooms ready for more beds. This way if things work well you can expand easily without re-modeling. If things do not go well you will be in a better financial situation. Thats how this salon worked, there were 4 rooms ready to go without beds, then using customer demand and feedback we added popular beds to those rooms when we calculated it would be profitable to do so.