Embracing your niche to find success
As a company that serves the Hair and Beauty industries, we keep a pretty keen ear to the ground about what’s buzzing around. After all, today’s rumour becomes tomorrow’s trend.
And recently, we’ve been hearing the same thing: embrace your niche.
The days of the one-stop shop will never be over! But as hair and beauty grows, there’s room for more approaches, and a big one is specialisation.
More and more, clients have come to appreciate (and seek out) the bespoke experience – one that prioritises quality and skill over ease of access or familiarity.
This isn’t a new concept. What’s new is that specialised offerings aren’t just for the exclusive (read: expensive) salons and spas anymore.
Normal people want the feeling of luxury without the guilt of extravagance.
It’s part and parcel of the modern “I want what I want, when I want it” culture, which is why Amazon, Netflix, Stitch Fix and the like have been so wildly successful.
Studio Sashiko (in British Columbia and California) is a great example of this: they’ve chosen to focus on their cosmetic tattooing and micropigmentation, instead of worrying about adding other cosmetic services that might seem to fit in. And it certainly hasn’t done them any harm!
So how’s a salon to handle this new demand for specialty experiences? And why bother changing something that’s already working?
Don’t panic
First of all, don’t immediately change course and cut out 80% of your offerings. But it’s worth taking a look at the path your business is on at the moment, and ask yourself if it’s serving you well. See if you can answer these questions quickly and easily:
- What do clients most value about my business?
- What is the service that gets booked most often? Least often?
- What can I do better than anyone else in my area?
Maybe no one can touch your skill with curly hair. Maybe it’s your hand-picked playlists and laid-back atmosphere that keep people coming back for more. Maybe your clients love the face massage so much that they keep booking in for a shave when they don’t even need one.
Whatever it is that makes you different – and better – than everyone else, don’t be afraid to double down on that.
Specialising can take a few forms. Maybe it’s cutting out some of your services that are taking up your staff’s time but not really gaining you much. It could mean you need to invest in extra training or tools to bring some of your current offerings up to the next level. If this is something you can build into your budget over the next six months to a year, why not go for it?
Start where you’re at now, and see what you can build, slowly and steadily.
Start bragging
As soon as you identify one or two core value offerings, you’ll find your marketing becomes clearer, too. It’s hard to find a coherent marketing theme if you’re not sure what it actually is that makes you valuable to people.
Doubling down on your core offerings will make it really easy to double down on your marketing.
If you’ve embraced your specialisation, your message to clients will become clear as day. You can sing your own praises to the rooftops because you can be genuinely confident that you are offering a unique, exceptional experience. And that confidence will show in everything you do. Don’t underestimate the value of authenticity!
Jazz Pampling is a sought-after eyebrow artist whose niche is (you guessed it) eyebrows. She gained the reputations as one of the best in the business because she focused on being the best – at that one thing. “We worry about trying to be great at everything, and it means that our service is not always the best that we want it to be,” she said in an interview last August.
Why should your clients come to you over the other three spas in town? Because you can give them the best experience.
The thing is, you can’t be the best at everything. As soon as you try to be all things to all people, you begin diluting your offerings, and people stop believing what you’re selling. As Ashleigh Scott of The Facialist in Auckland told us, “When you find that passion and purpose, everything just snowballs into place!”
Pay attention
If you start making moves toward embracing your niche, keep an eye on the results. Maybe you’ll start seeing new clients coming in. Or, maybe you won’t see any changes in your clientele, but you’ll see cheers of relief from your staff as you begin ditching services that they didn’t see the point of. Whatever the results are, pay attention and learn from them!
Don’t be afraid to specialise. And don’t be afraid to tell your clients just how good you are. You’ve worked hard to become a business owner, an artist, and an expert. The clients who appreciate what you have to offer are the ones you want. They’re the ones that will come back time and time again, and will spread the word about you to all their friends.
This was originally written for the September 2016 issue of InStyle Hair Magazine.
