The gap
Our locality had barbershops for men and parlours for women. It didn't have a unisex salon with good hygiene and a decent experience. That was the opening. We spent three to four months planning before we opened - staffing, rent, product costing across brands, pre-launch marketing - and priced by benchmarking unisex salons elsewhere in the city. That part we got roughly right.
The problem that kept coming back
Revenue dips in the off-season. Footfall drops across every salon in the city during that stretch, so this wasn't unique to us - but knowing that didn't help. We could see it in the DINGG data every year: fewer appointments, and afternoons almost empty.
Afternoons were the specific pattern worth attacking. Clients came in the evenings and on weekends. The chairs sat idle for hours in between, and idle chairs still cost rent and salary.
What we tried
Happy hours came first, and the logic was narrow on purpose: shift existing demand into the dead hours rather than chase new customers during a season when nobody's coming out anyway. We also ran discounts and packages.
The one I'd actually defend is the membership plan. ₹1,000 upfront buys a year of 20% off all services - for the whole family, not just the buyer - and the ₹1,000 is redeemable after the customer's fourth visit.
Three things are happening in that structure. The upfront payment is revenue before the service. Extending the discount to the family raises the value enough to justify paying for a discount at all. And the fourth-visit redemption is the part I'm most pleased with: it means the customer only gets their money back by forming a habit, which is exactly the behaviour a salon needs and exactly what a plain discount doesn't buy.
Did it work?
Revenue improved in the off-season, though I can't separate what the membership plan did from what the offers did.
What I got wrong, and what changed
The real constraint wasn't pricing or promotions. It was that I didn't know how to market.
We were running Instagram posts, stories, collaborations and WhatsApp broadcasts without much idea which of them did anything. Now I treat marketing as a fixed monthly allocation out of revenue rather than a thing we do when revenue dips - and I've worked out that paid Instagram reel promotion returns the most of what we've tried. Most new enquiries come through Instagram.
The strategic shift is that I stopped thinking about campaigns and started thinking about positioning: repeated, consistent presence so that when someone in the area thinks about a salon, ours is the one that reads as premium. That's a slower bet than an off-season discount, and I think it's the right one.
The honest summary is that I diagnosed a seasonal problem correctly, built a reasonable mechanic against it, and took another two years to work out that the bigger problem was upstream of the one I was solving.