peach

A lot has to do with demographics and competition. With less comp. you may need to be able to handle more volume. The
performance of your equipment is probably the second most important issue. People will go out of their way to go to a clean friendly place where the beds rock. Some of the best beds ever built are in the 10-15 year old range. As the saying goes, "it's not the beds, its the bulbs". You can pick up some second generation equipment for practically nothing. Look for an old building or warehouse, redo it and be patient...

Black Sun

Quote:

Originally Posted by peach Some of the best beds ever built are in the 10-15 year old range. As the saying goes, "it's not the beds, its the bulbs". You can pick up some second generation equipment for practically nothing. Look for an old building or warehouse, redo it and be patient...

Very true...to this date, I believe the best equipment ever produced were the old Mueller line and UWE line.

Gotta love the old Orbits, SunEclipse, Great Sun, Future Sun..Old Silver Bullets, Black Energy, S-Class...great beds.

Never a fan of anything else, old or new

And totally agree on the old warehouse/building thing...high open ceilings, cement glazed floors, exposed brick walls...could do a lot with space like that for little $$ and have a nice place with less than 10 beds

peach

I have posted on other sites, that I have a 2000 sq ft space that I pay $850 a month in rent on. It is an old convenience store. I have 18 beds in there, 4 standups and a spray booth. I don't have 20k in the equipment. It looks nice and the store rocks! But everyone on the other sites called me a liar,a troll and banned me. There are a lot of people in this industry that want you to believe that you have to locate next to the starbucks in the mall, and spend 200k to open a successful salon. It is BS. They are killing the industry with their stupid cookie cutter advise.

Black Sun

It is..for this business environment (based on fading interest in tanning from a public perspective)...that averages out to about 7 tanners an hour during the 12 hours of being open. At least each bed being used per hour, so not bad...could be better, but HEY, take what you can

mosalonowner

I wish i had 81 tanners in a day! How did you market yourself to swing that?