Naming Your Salon

If you’re forging into the body-bronzing business for the first time, you’ll find the adage, "It’s all in the name" is true. The equipment, the services, the prices and the staff may all be first-rate, but how potential customers perceive the salon hinges on what they see headlining its Web site or hanging outside its front door.

Though imperative for a new multi-salon company, the name game has higher stakes for smaller tanning businesses—particularly single salons that will rely more on name recognition because they don’t have the budget to support many forms of marketing, says Hal Meyer, CEO of Naming Systems in Wakefield, R.I.

Chris DeMassa, president of TradeMark Express in Los Altos, Calif., emphasizes this point, saying, "It’s the face of your business. It’s what you’re going to be recognized for, and it’s how people are going to remember you."

What To Avoid

Several consultants weighed in on salon nomenclature. First of all, any name should appeal to the audience, not only the owner, says Nan Budinger, principal of Metaphor Name Consultants in San Francisco. An inside joke between friends and family would be lost on your customers. Similarly, Budinger warns against dated titles that, though popular now, could make your salon less-than-hip before long.

"Think of it in terms of ‘groovy,’" she says. "You don’t want to name your salon with verbal bell-bottoms." In other words, if you had your heart set on "Bling Bling Tanning," you might want to reconsider.

Also be mindful of connotations your name might give. You don’t want someone to take a photo of the sign so that late-night comedians can mock your business.

With a lot of successful names already taken off the market by current salons, piracy won’t win you any points, either. Make sure to search the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (www.uspto.org) to make sure that a potential name isn’t a copycat version of another salon. Launching with a particular name and then having to re-do the signs, listings and stationery because of trademark law would be a major step back, Budinger says.

What To Try

With a bevy of naming "don’ts," what options are you left with? Plenty.

Focus on being original—because there are a lot of salons with very similar names, choosing something unique and fun will set you apart, and people will remember you over the competition.

In addition, a good salon name definitely doesn’t limit its scope to local, so try to dub your business with a name that would leave the door open for expansion and national or global exposure. Good examples are the European Image salons based in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., or the Body and Sol (Spanish for "sun") Tanning Boutiques based in Yorktown, Va.