tnsherrie

Hello everyone,
I have owned a video store for 3 years and it does well. I tan myself (elsewhere) and am considering adding tanning to my video store. I have did alot of research but figured the experienced was the best research and was hoping you might could make some suggestions to help in my decision. I do not want a 10 bed salon to begin-I would just like to add 3 or 4 beds to start. Im not going to just through them in the store, I would like to make it a seperate entity apart from the video. I already have 6 rooms built out in my current store that would be great for tanning rooms and extra space to add more if I need. My store now is 7,000 sq ft with 5500 being used for video. I do not want to purchase the most expensive beds to start but would like good dependable beds and be able to be competitive with other salons. I am in a town of about 55,000 and only 3 larger tanning salons(independents 6-15 beds)available to tan besides a couple hair salons with a bed or two. I have added some questions and hope you can give me some insite. Any comments or suggestions you would like to share (bad or good) would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all in advance!

What brand, kind of beds should I purchase?

How many lamps do the beds need to have? with or without facials? What wattage lamps?

Number of beds I should start with?

Best place to buy lotions & accessories?

Thank you for reading this long post as I stated I am new to this industry and would appreciate any and all help I can get.

Xpress Gym

Hello tnsherrie,
I can't speak for others here but I love being a mixed use salon. Fitness and tanning. I only have 3 beds and also do sunless spray tanning. I am 3000 sf. Small but power packed. I started off with 3 basic beds and last year replaced one with a High pressure bed. I would suggest to mix up the beds so you can up sell customers and right now you can find a ton of used equipment. That will save you $$. Look in the "for sale" forum here. Also I found it difficult to find a really good distributor- till I found tantalk. I have since been using URI. Be careful to check how much power you have going into your place that my tell you how many beds you want to start out with. Adding power is mucho money. Second check the HVAC you have for your place as well proably the second most costly item in starting tanning salon. Hope this helps.

tansource

video and tanning is a match made in heaven. Make sure you have electricity prior to starting down this path. Most video stores are very cash poor right now so an electric upgrade could kill the idea. You will need a minimum 400amp 3 phase service before even starting a tanning salon. Can you throw some little beds in there on 200amps yes you can but you will fail going in like that.

Consider 2 nicer beds and 2 base beds surrounded by modular walls which are a straight writeoff. You can buy some nice base beds for under 5k and if you really want to cut costs you can find a broker and get used base beds. But again coming into the market in a low budget cheap way no longer works in tanning. Many have fallen using that method. You are better off doing new nicer equipment. UWE makes the cobra which are just plain nice and solid and they are ready for a deal. Heartland also make nice base equipment.

For a midlevel bed (all 160 watt with 3 or 4 facials) you can stick with same brand as you start with.

Good news is you already have the space and all that so your risk is minimal and you can always liquidate the stuff if it doesn't work. You really can't lose badly in an attempt so if the stars align go for it.

Make sure you do a demographic map and competitive analysis prior to moving forward. not to state the obvious but you never know

crzytanner

When we first opened 12 years ago we had videos and tanning. We only do tanning now. Hollywood Videos put our video biz out of business, didn't do well at all with videos but we've been tanning for 13 years now.

Steve Underhill

Tanning and video work well together when they are separated. The video customer is the tanning customer. There are many video & tanning salon operators that visit this site and I am sure they will respond to your inquiries. A few of my clients have this combination and do extremely well.