Deciding how much inventory to stock and how much money to ask for your products are two main factors for successfully retailing lotions in your salon. Deciding how much is enough is an individual task that requires serious consideration if you are to run a profitable business and retain satisfied customers.
How Much Is Enough?
The amount of inventory a salon should carry will depend on a number of factors, including the size of the salon, how many pieces of tanning or spa-related equipment it offers, the type of clientele it caters to as well as how much business it does per season. Obviously, a salon should stock up on its inventory at the beginning of its high season and then order more products as necessary as the season begins to taper off.
However, the general consensus among industry experts is that the worst thing a salon owner can do is being caught short-handed, at any time of the year. There is no magic answer to inventory; however, salon owners should not be afraid to have enough because lotion sales mean money.
Some salon owners say, ‘I don’t want to get stuck with a case of something I can’t sell.’ However, properly marketed any salon owner can sell lotions. For example, if a salon owner has a slow-moving product, provide a couple of free tanning sessions with the purchase.
Knowing your customers and anticipating how much business will come through your door in a particular month will help you determine how much inventory to stock. A helpful strategy is to go back and look at the previous year’s receipts to see what sold, how much of it sold, and if its sales increased or declined during a particular month or season. Whatever the case, if you are going to carry a product, don’t just have one bottle of it in your salon because one item on a shelf will never sell because people think nobody wants that one bottle. Veterans suggest having at least three each of one item because it will help sell the product faster.
In addition, having only one or two bottles of a product in the salon means that if one customer buys a bottle, and then another customer also decides to buy a bottle, in one fell swoop you have no product left.
This is especially true with the top-selling items. Salon owners should always have a good stock of product on the shelves, and some for backup. The shelf life of most lotions is at least one year, if not two to three years. One national lotion manufacturing company suggests always making a fresh supply of products available to customers, and displaying them in substantial quantities.
For instance, some salons tend to put out one or two bottles of each product, perhaps because they want to make their retail area look artistic, or maybe they just don’t want to invest in a lot of inventory. However, it’s definitely much more appealing to present a fully stocked retail center with rows and rows of products.
