Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hairstylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen? Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you weren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success, but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer. Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists. I’m Britt Siva, social media and marketing strategist just for hairstylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Siva, and today we’re talking about salon photo shoot tips and strategies. Right at the top of this episode, I wanna tell you who this is for. If you are in a studio suite, if you are a booth renter, if you are a salon owner with a team, if you have an in- home salon, this is for you. The only person who this might not be for would be like an employee, a commission stylist, um, because your owner should be doing all of this for you, but literally for anybody else, no matter how you work, this is for you. I’ve coached stylists who are booth renters, suite owners, salon owners, in- home stylists all to do this. And so for anybody who’s in any of those categories, this is for you.
I’ll be honest, this is one of those episodes I thought I had already recorded, and then I was talking to a salon owner, I was actually private coaching somebody one-to-one. And she had recently done a shoot, a photo shoot, and she was like, “I’m so excited to show you. ” And she pulled up the pictures, and I was like, “Oh, wow. Tell me about this photo shoot.” And she’s like, “Oh, we just thought it would be fun.” And I looked at the photos and I was like, “I’m certain this was fun. I can’t see how we would incorporate this into your business in a successful way.” I said, “This might just kind of be one of those things that ends up being a fun project for the team, but I don’t think that we can use much of this content in a way that I could confidently say would make it easier for you to hire or would fill your shares with clients.” And this owner was so surprised because they were like, “Oh my gosh, it was really fun to plan and we, we just thought it was gonna be fun.” And doing something that’s fun or doing something that’s cool versus doing a photo shoot that builds your clientele and increases demand to work for you can be two completely different things.
The other thing that I’ve noticed is I think that some photo shoots are becoming dated and I don’t even necessarily think that the stylist or the salon who’s booking those shoots realizes that they’re playing like a 2023 game, but they’re doing kind of more of the same that worked a couple of years ago and they’re like, “We always love it. ” And it’s, the strategy has changed a little bit. And so this is for anybody who’s done a shoot or is thinking about doing a shoot or is intimidated by a shoot or doesn’t think they can afford one or doesn’t think it’s important. It’s just for all of you. We’re just gonna talk all things photos, professional photography for the salon, no matter how your setup looks. So first of all, what would be the point of doing a salon photo shoot? Why is a studio suite owner?
Should I do something like that? Like a lot of studio suite owners are already financially stretched, especially when they’re first starting out, same for booth renters. I mean, let’s be honest, same for salon owners. There can always be anybody who’s stretched. And so doing a salon photo shoot can feel like an expense they can’t afford. When done right, a salon photo shoot will always be an investment. One of our largest marketing expenses as a business this year is in the photography and videography department, in my personal business right now, because we know it’s so critical. We will spend more marketing money on videography and photography than anything else because it’s so crucial from a visual standpoint, if you wanna stand out as a brand. And so if you as an individual stylist are not creating a visually appealing brand on the internet, it will impact your revenue, it will impact your rate of growth, like it’s just kind of goes hand in hand.
When you look at individual stylists or salons that are growing really fast right now, they are incorporating really high quality photography and videography into their brand and business because it helps to build trust with the clients. So you can start this small scale and then what you’ll see is it’s incredibly effective and it can be something that you add on to over time. So when we think about how much would this investment be, I know some people at first think, “Oh, I’m just gonna take the photos myself,” or, “I’ve got somebody who’s got a fancy camera, I’ll have them come in and do it. ” I have found that professional photography and business photography is one of those things you definitely get what you pay for. So as soon as you ask your cousin or your friend or your DIYat or your kid comes in or whatever, it’s going to look like your kid came in and took the photos.
Like it’s just, it’s not gonna be that great compared to the salon a few blocks over who really went for it, if I’m torn between your two businesses, they’re gonna get mine because that visual trust is so crucial in the eyes of the client right now. So when we look at the investment, anywhere from $350 to a thousand plus is the going rate that I’m seeing coast to coast. When you get on the coasts, it’s gonna be more expensive. I know in the Midwest you can find somebody who is more inexpensive, like on the lower end of things and still get that really high quality result. I think as soon as you start to dip under that, I do worry that you’re going to spend lots of time and lots of energy and lots of effort and get the photos back and it’s not gonna be quite right.
I’ve seen some photo shoots too where it’s like, uh, I could see what you were going for there, but the person didn’t understand indoor lighting or the, they didn’t understand composition or they didn’t quite understand how to feature the client without having it be a face shot of the client. They didn’t understand the nuances of the job. And that’s why when you spend a little bit more and you bring in somebody who really understands the assignment, you’re gonna waste less time and get a much stronger result. And like I said, I know even spending $350 on a photo shoot can feel expensive. It is one of those things that’s investment and when I see salons and independent stylists make this leap, it builds their individual confidence and it really takes the brand to the next level. It’s pretty significant and the amount of traction you get from a demand standpoint, whether it be you’re trying to hire or you’re trying to fill chairs happens pretty immediately, which feels nice.
You’ll see that return on investment pretty quick. So then the question is where do we use these photos? First and foremost, you’re gonna use them on your website and your booking page. All of your social media should be incorporating these definitely on your Google reviews if you have Yelp reviews. Facebook, we want to incorporate Instagram, of course. Now, Instagram is kind of unique in that you’d want to balance of these professional photos and photos of your work that you’re taking, you know, in salon. It’s a balance of the both, but these photos would integrate pretty much everywhere. When we think about professional photos, it creates brand trust, brand recognition, brand confidence. So we’re going to incorporate these a lot of different places. With that, when you bring in a photographer, you want to make sure that you’re asking for photos in two different formats. We want a mix of horizontal and vertical.
So what I find when I’m coaching stylists salons through website building is they don’t have nearly enough horizontal photos. So horizontal would be the long skinny way, like the hot dog way, right? It’s a photo that goes side to side. You need an incredibly wide photo to span the width of a website and it’s one of the hardest things to find. I know it sounds kind of nutty. Until you’ve gone in to build the website and found a shortage of horizontal photos and then you laugh as I’m saying this because you’ve been there before, it’s tricky. And then the verticals are much more useful for social media, bio headshots, things like that, but those horizontals are critical and they’re hard to come by. Also, if you’re in a studio suite or in a full salon, horizontal images of your space are killer on a website.
So we’ll talk about photo composition and how to find a photographer who can pull that off, but the more wide frame, kind of that hotdog way, landscape mode of doing photos, the more of those you can get, the better. The vertical, the up and down ones seem to be easier to grab, make sure you get plenty of horizontal. So let’s talk about what kinds of photos are now off trend. And this is the area where I see some salons kind of playing a, a slow game. So models that don’t look like everyday clients. So if you have been in the industry as long as I have, you’ll remember in the 2000s, you would go into a salon in the art on the walls, the pictures on the website, all of that, salons would use brand photos. So if I was associated with a Redkin, you know, Redkin would produce images every spring and images every fall and salons would hang those on their walls or put them on their website or in their windows as their branding photos.
And they were like these very aspirational model shots. And you can name any renovative Purology, any, any of the brands from that era, Paul Mitchell, they were all doing it. And we were all buying into it. It was the way to do it. So then there was this next evolution where salons would do these elevated, elegant photo shoots where it was, I almost want to say costumey, that’s like a major exaggeration, but it was a little over the top. And there’s actually still today, there’s organizations who do like awards for like very incredible hair design and there, there’s an art to it and I totally understand all of that. To a client today, what they’re looking for is photos that are relatable. And so when salons are doing these photo shoots that are highly produced and over the top and it’s feeling special event and it’s feeling special occasion, it’s almost like aspirational and like, well, our clients don’t really come in asking for this or looking like this, but they love this woman.
It ends up being a disconnect. And I see salons putting a lot of energy and effort into photo shoots like that. Your buck will go so much further. If you do a photo shoot of clients who look like the clientele you’re trying to attract, you’re also going to get more qualified stylists looking to work for you. For example, if you were to do a photo of, you know, a very staged faux client with the, this over the top blowout, a really killer colorist might look at that and be like, “That’s not the hair I do. I just do like incredible formulation.” And they might feel like your salon is a mismatch. When you were just trying to pull off a fun photo shoot, it can just be a bit of a misfire in the messaging. So you want to make sure that as you’re doing these photo shoots, the models look like everyday clients.
Your stylists look like they would when clients come in. And it’s not to say you can’t do themes. We’ll talk about themes in a moment, but there needs to be a correlation between who you are and the work you do and the photo shoots that you’re setting up. Super important. Next, flat lays. So this was trendy five, six, eight, 10 years ago. I’ll explain what a flat lay is. It’s a silo photography where you lay out certain elements and then a photographer takes a photo from above. So picture, um, a bleach bowl with a brush ling across it and a foiling comb and a stack of foils and a coffee cup. That would be a flat lay. The challenge with content like that is you and I have both seen thousands of photos that look like that as we scroll our Instagram. So have your clients.
It’s boring. It’s not easy to incorporate into a website in a meaningful way. It’s not easy to incorporate in social media in a way. I call that filler content. And for a long time, the platforms actually used a lot of filler content, so it was fine. The attention spans are too short right now. Platforms are too noisy right now. You can’t waste time on filler content. So I wouldn’t do any of that kind of stuff. We’ll talk about experience photos, which is different in a moment, but skip any of those kind of like flat lay cheesy stuff, you won’t use it. The other thing is like retail specific photos. If you’re doing a photo of your salon space and you have a great retail display, make the retail display gorgeous, include it in one of the photos, but we used to see these very staged like shampoo, conditioner, masks, trios, photo, make a caption about it.
Again, it lands as like cheesy and forced. When you’re using posts to sell, it’s kind of a turnoff to guess. We want to communicate and share and create energy. Skipping all of those would be my recommendation. They’re not as effective as they used to be. The other thing that’s kind of fading off trend. So not only to say it’s off trend, but it’s fading off trend, is when we look at headshots, the kind of hand on the hip, staring forward, big smile like ultra posed, what’s really trending in marketing right now is authenticity. And if you find a great photographer who’s able to take more candid, casual shots, sometimes a great bio photo is a stylist behind the chair doing a blowout. That can be a great one. A stylist kind of like laughing, looking a little more casual. The approachability versus the intimidation of a more professional headshot, we’re just seeing it trend that direction.
It’s one of those things that’s kind of headed out the door, it’s not out the door yet, but it’s just something to keep in mind, something to consider. So let’s talk about what kind of photos you’re looking to get if we’re doing that. So if those are the kind of things we don’t want, what do we want? You want photos of your space, photos of yourself, photos of your team if you have one, even if you just have an assistant. So if you’re in a studio suite and you have an assistant, we want the assistant in some of the photos, and then photos of the experience. So those are the four categories we’re trying to capture. If we’re going to do photos of the experience, you need to bring in a model, and the model should look like the target market clients that you serve.
A couple of models is even better, but we want it to look like target market clientele, not actual models. Like we want it to be relatable and approachable and as if it was just a day in the salon and somebody came and captured it. So let’s talk about photos of your space. When I talk to studio suite owners, they’ll often say like, my space doesn’t photograph well. I disagree, just haven’t figured out how to photograph it well. I’ve seen some of the most impressive photo shoots come out of studio suites. We have hosted a photo shoot in a studio suite and it turned out gorgeous. So I’ll share some of the, the strategies that were used for that. If you’re doing a salon space, of course you’re gonna want to have the entire salon shot. Let’s talk about when we’re staging that salon space, what we want to keep in mind, and then we’ll go back to the details of each.
So let’s talk about photographing your space for just a moment. A little hack that I learned was if you bring in a real estate photographer, they will get the best photos of your space because they’re used to being creative in the way that they use their lenses and their eye and their body positioning to make every space they photograph look as impressive as possible. Like imagine a real estate photographer how they have to make a tiny closet look good for that Zillow listing. They’re very good at it. Now, they won’t make your space look fake. They’re going to make it look as best as possible. So in our salon, we had some kind of like tight corners and some funny cubbies and things like that. The way that he photographed all of our awkward angles was so impressive. And we found this person on a whim.
He was referred to us and he ended up being the best internal space photographer I’ve ever seen in my life. And he was like, “My specialty is real estate.” So if you can contact somebody who does real estate photography, they will photograph your suite or your salon space like a dream. It will have never looked better. Now, a couple of things that will help to make your space look as good as possible. Consider lighting. So overhead fluorescent lighting is always gonna photograph strange. The photographer who did our salon space actually had all of our overhead lighting turned off. He did bring in a couple of soft boxes and then used natural lighting and then did the rest of the lighting in post edit. So if you can bring in additional lighting or walk through the space with the photographer ahead of time and say, “Hey, what’s gonna work best?” You might be able to use your lighting.
It might be totally fine, but a great shot will be ruined by bad lighting. And if all you have to work with is like overhead lighting in a, at a nighttime photo shoot or something, it’s probably not gonna photograph well. So you wanna set yourself up lighting wise for best possible experience, and you can talk to your photographer about that. A good one should know what to do. You want to cleanse the space and not just like sweep and wipe down. So when I talk to clients about what they look for when they’re looking at salons, and I say, “What are the things that make you choose the salon space?” They say words like cleanliness, tidy, clutter-free, cozy. Cozy comes up a lot and I’ve shared some photos and said like, “What do you like about this photo? What do you not like? ” Often salon photos come across sterile.
So this is the risk that we run is a wiped, clean salon is kind of just like chairs and stations, and it can look almost medicinal. And you wanna stay away from that. Same with the studio suite. If you’re not careful, it almost looks like a place where a procedure’s gonna happen and it, it just doesn’t feel warm and inviting. Ways to make it feel warm and inviting, incorporate a client or a model into the shot. That’s always gonna make it cozier. The other thing we wanna do is we want to eliminate all retail from the station tops. If you have a retail display, you can leave that up. You should, of course, make sense. If you have a retail on the station tops, take it down. Wires, chords, hot tools do not photograph well when like plugged into the station or as part of anything like that.
Sheers on the station. Take all of that off. It will just make a photo look cluttered. So even though when they come into your salon for a service, you probably will have your shears out. I’m sure there will be a hairspray on the counter or something else. It’s okay. For the photo, you want it to seem as pristine as possible. So then how do we have the coziness? That’s when you add in textures and layers. So it could be a blanket, it could be a plant, could be a coffee cup sometimes, although you have to be careful with that because that could land as clutter too. A good photographer is also gonna be able to help with this, and we’re gonna talk about photo inspiration in a moment also, but you want your space to look not so sterile. There has to be a little bit of a cozy lived-in essence to it while still feeling very clean and tidy.
So then the question is, what about like a barbershop? When I talk to clients who are going to a barbershop, a little bit different, tidy, but fun. There’s this like fun, vibey, like chill out element that they’re looking for. And so you wanna make sure that that gets captured too, because again, it can come across really sterile and like, you know, straight edge razors if you’re not careful. So, so you wanna make sure that there’s that balance between the two. The other thing that can make a photo shoot look surprisingly cluttered is snacks. And I know that sounds weird, but I’ve seen a lot of photo shoots where the salon space looks gorgeous. Like there was a salon I was looking at recently and there’s, their colors were best described as sunset. And that might have even been what they were going for. It was like yellows, oranges, peaches, pinks, and lavenders.
It was a studio suite. It was really cool. And then in the corner, and beautiful photography, but in the corner was their snack station and they had a mini fridge. And in the mini fridge there was like La Croix’s and, uh, and you know Lacroix, they’re like rainbow colored, right? And then on top there was a basket with like chips and gum and candies and, you know, mixed nuts and whatever. And it kind of took away the magic. Like everything in the suite was cohesive except that little fridge area. And if I was to walk into the space, it wouldn’t land so offensively, but in a photo, it was like my eye went there and I couldn’t look away. It was a distraction. That’s the best way to describe it. Versus what I would do is for the photo shoot, I’d probably kill the snack station, like not include it in the photos, but then rebuild the snack station and have the photographer just take photos of that, right?
And you can incorporate that other places. You’ll see what I mean. If you do a photo shoot and you include your snacks, it just, it changes the energy. It is a distraction. So just play with things like that. There’s little details that really make the photo shoot stronger or weaker. Now, what if you are a booth renter? How do you pull this off? Some of the most successful booth renters I know are doing photo shoots like this. And what they’ll do is they’ll talk to the owner about it, of course, but often come in on a day where it’s just them. So it could be a day the salon’s closed or maybe they’re the only renter there that day or the only renter in the morning, something like that. They’ll make arrangements. And just come in, it only takes a couple of hours, bring in a model, do a client, do the photos.
Um, what you can do if you’re bringing in a model is have the photographer come in, do 30 minutes, 45 minutes of shots of just you, shots of the salon space, and then have the model come in for a blowout for the next hour. The photographer can kind of zip around, get some candids. And that’s usually a pretty good cadence. If you’re a solo stylist, a couple of hours usually gets it done. You’ll get 30 or 50 good shots from that, and it’ll be pretty solid stuff. So it really can be done. Same with a studio suite owner, you could do it in a similar way. Now a salon team is gonna be quite different, right? A salon team, you’re going to want solo shots, model shots, group shots, small group shots. So knocking that out in two hours is probably a little bit unrealistic.
You’re gonna want more time. Now let’s talk about location because so far I have focused on the photo shoot happening in your studio suite or in your salon. I am of the firm belief that if you’re a booth renter, a studio suite owner or salon owner, you need photos in your salon space. Clients today expect to know full on what your space looks like before they walk through the door. And if you’re not proud of your space, that’s kind of a moment of reflection, right? So clients really rank environment incredibly high when they’re choosing where they go. And so showing off like my space is tidy and cozy and all of those things that we know they’re looking for is just gonna continue to build that trust.
So everybody at Baseline needs photo of their space in their space. Now, what is on trend, at least for now, I do think it’s a little bit on the way out, but it’s on trend for now, so we’re gonna talk about it, is setting up more of a staged photo shoot in a photo shoot location. So something cool that we saw coming out of 2020, this was like another COVID business birth, were these pop-up photo studios. Not that they didn’t exist before, but now they exist in mass, especially in certain areas. Like where I live, they’re everywhere. It’s a former retail space or office space that’s been turned into a pop-up photo studio, and you go in there and they have different papers that you can pull down to change the color of the backdrop. And often you’ll go in and they have like chairs or couches or different props that you can use in the photo shoot.
And those can be really cool too because you can set up kind of like fun, themed quarterly or semi-annual photo shoots in these beautiful spaces that are not in your salon. A photographing in salon does have some limitations. So once you do have that baseline photo shoot done using your salon space, it can be fun to shake it up and do something in a secondary space. My daughter started renting a booth in November and we did a shoot for her in a pop-up space. It was small, it wasn’t fancy, and it turned out really great. So those can be really effective as well. And it’s just a little bit something different than just shooting the same location all the time. So how do you know where you wanna shoot, what photos to get? If you’re sold on this idea, which I hope everybody is, what I suggest you do first is research.
I want you to look at other salons and other stylists. If you’re a Thriver Society member, all of our experienced thrivers have done this. Definitely all of our ex- clubbers have done this. You can take a look through the directory and find them and see what they’ve done and what they’ve been up to and how they’ve pulled this off. Get inspiration first. Look up photo shoots that you admire. Um, look at the salon shots that you’re drawn to. Look at the salon shots that you’re not drawn to. Look at the stage photo shoots that have been done in these like pop-up spaces and, and how they’ve turned out and what kind of vibe they’ve gone with. And does that serve your target market clientele? Like spend a week looking at what others have done. Could you do this on a Pinterest board? Of course you could, but I think the easy way to do it would be on Instagram and to create a gallery of saved posts.
So you can save any Instagram post if you don’t know that. There’s a, a button in the bottom right corner that you can pick and you could save the post and you can create a gallery or an album of just those photos. So you can save an album that’s called, you know, Salon Photo Shoot Inspo and just save them all to there. And then when you find your photographer, you can send it to them and say, “This is what I’m going for. These are the shots I like. I wanna get some of these.” And it gives them that, that creative direction that they need to. Um, and it’s gonna help you to hone in what shots you want, what shots you don’t want, the vibe you’re going for, angles that look good, shots that you know that you can use in marketing, shots that look good on your website, et cetera, et cetera.
So create the vision board first, save photos, get ideas, then you’re gonna look for the photographer who’s able to kind of pull off what you’re going for, decide whether you wanna shoot in salon. If you’ve not done an in salon shoot, I highly recommend doing that, whether you’re a suite owner, a salon owner, a booth renter, in home, I think you start there. And then if you wanna do kind of like a more fun secondary location, you can add that on as well. When we look at team-based salons, the salons that I know that are growing fast are doing photo shoots two to four times a year, so very, very frequently. It’s a huge benefit to the team. Um, and when stylists, or when salon owners say to me, you know, my team doesn’t market, my team doesn’t post enough, when you’re serving them up so much content, everyone’s gonna grow like a rising tide lifts all boats.
Usually the problem is not enough, um, confidence in the content, not enough content to share. This overcomes that immediately, that’s no longer an issue, and you’re looking so ahead of the game, and it’s a relatively small investment when you think about team retention and the benefit to be able to market, it’s pretty significant. So leaning in that direction can be incredibly effective. If you are a suite owner, once a year is great, a booth renter once a year, every 18 months is great. You know, this is kind of one of those things, the more often you do it, the more effective that it is, but start with one. You’ll find that having these incredible photos of your space builds so much confidence. If you have any additional marketing questions or any questions at all, you can always send me a rating and review on iTunes.
Happy to help however I can. So much love, happy business building. I’ll see you on the next one.
