Creating A Brand

Reorganizing a business that has been solely focused on one service can be tough. A lot of thinking has gone into creating profitable addenda to tanning that increase profits, provide stability, smooth the peaks and valleys of the tanning cycle, provide a long-term potential for continuing business and generate opportunities for businesses that can branch off from the main salon operation.

The point is that accessory enterprises do not detract from the owner’s commitment to tanning, they increase the sales power of the tanning environment and broaden the base of the entire industry.

This section should not be misconstrued as an inclusive assessment of all the options open to the tanning salon owner. It is hardly that. Instead, the editors of LOOKING FIT® have looked at some of the most popular and profitable sidelines and the ways to market them in order to provide the owner with some options that can work for a variety of salons. Most notably, this list tries to encompass some diversity, but be forewarned, that the type, style and amount of accessory products are limited by only one factor-the imagination of the owner.

Regional geographical and cultural approaches are diverse and abundant. What success a Northeastern tanning salon might have with T-shirt accessories in a summertime promotion, might not be repeated by a Florida salon with abundant suppliers of T-shirt lines all over. The designation of consumer goods is broad. What could be a convenience purchase or a shopping item in one shop would be a specialty item in another locale. For example, T-shirts might be a convenience item in the South, but in the colder Northeast, during some months of the year, they could be a specialty item.

Just as important as the idea of what to market is the responsibility for how to market accessories. We consider the marketing of retail items to be a business quite different and in many ways more complicated than tanning. Marketing knowledge is crucial.

Although accessories and auxiliary businesses aren’t the answer for everyone, for the non-purist, the accessories game makes good sense for bringing in solid sales and repeat business.

The move to retail selling is not for everyone; however, the versatility and flexibility that sales can add to the service-based salon operation can be an invaluable source of capital during lean times. The promise that retailing holds is not realized in every instance, but if the salon owner has practiced good selling techniques in marketing the salon operation itself, retailing is not that great a leap.

More often than not, salon owners talk themselves out of retailing for fear of taking on an entire new industry. Selling is selling, and in each case, the salon operator has a product. It is either an intangible product like a tan or a tangible one like a garment. Obviously, some of the most successful salon operations are ones where the barriers between retailing and servicing are broken down and melded into one seamless enterprise.

This is not an impossibility, but it takes a firm commitment to both aspects of the operation and an awareness of the similarities and differences between the various operations.