What is up?
And welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
I’m your host, Britt Seva.
And our annual leadership one week bootcamp kicks off today.
I’m so excited.
This is your absolute last chance to get access to this one week training for salon owners.
You’re not gonna wanna miss this one.
So if you are a Thriver Society member already, or you’re a non-thriver, this is truly your last chance to save your seat.
We have already got hundreds of salon owners registered.
They’re gonna be learning step by step what’s working for the fastest growing salons when it comes to profit, compensation, motivating team members, rental rates, marketing, business ops, you name it, we’re hitting it.
We only do these one week leadership trainings once a year.
And every year, somebody DMs me after the bootcamp has started saying I missed it when’s the next one.
The next one’s in 2026.
So just don’t miss this one.
If you wanna learn more about the one week digital training, head to thrivingstylist.com/rapidgrowthbootcamp.
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We’re kickin off right now.
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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 Seva, 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 Seva, and we’re going to talk about what to do if you haven’t raised your prices in five years or seven years or 10 years or two years, or it’s been a while and you’re realizing maybe it’s time and you don’t know where to start.
So this is another very inspired episode.
I want to thank Shell Beach 7 for submitting this question as a rating or review on iTunes, which is the best way to get podcast episode requests into us.
So Shell Beach 7 says, “Hi Britt, I’m so excited to have found your podcast.
I respect your insight, knowledge and professionalism.
I’ve been an independent hair stylist booth renter for 30 years.
My schedule stays quite full.
I work too many hours, consistently get new referrals.
I don’t advertise or do social media.
My clientele has a wide range, women, men, teens, and seniors.
I love my career and enjoy keeping up on education.
I’ve listened to you talk about raising prices, which is a struggle and a roadblock that I know is holding me back, and I’m losing money.
Our salon is busy and some of my colleagues are guilty of the same.
I’m embarrassed to say I’ve not had a price increase since 2018.”
So we’re looking at seven years at this point.
“It’s been so long, I don’t even know where to begin or how much to increase.
Even more with all that is happening politically, what I do know is I’m way below market value and need a swift kick.
Sincerely, embarrassed and tired of the insecurity and guilt of doing business.
Thank you so much for your time.”
Few things that jumped out to me here.
First of all, Shell Beach.
My gosh, this is like the most relatable submission of all time.
You are one of many in this position.
So thank you for speaking up for the thousands of stylists who are in the same position as you are.
A couple of things that jumped out to me, and I want to point them out because I think this is the reason why a lot of stylists and maybe salon leaders make the same decisions that Shell Beach did.
Shell Beach is booked and busy.
And I’ve talked about this before.
The model that the industry showed us, particularly in the early 2000s, was the goal is to be booked and busy.
Booked plus busy equals success.
Double booking equals double success.
Working harder, working more, doing twice as much, you get a gold star if you took 20 clients today, that was the business.
So when this stylist says they’ve been in the industry for 30 years, take them back 20 years ago.
We’re in 2005, they’ve been in the industry 10 years.
I’m gonna guess in 2005, this stylist was banging.
And this was the model, right?
And then continued to grow and scale until 2018, when for whatever reason, the price increases stopped.
So let’s talk about the psychology of that for a minute.
If this person had told me, I haven’t raised my prices since 2020 or 2021, I’d almost kind of get it because the world changed.
And I think the stylist and salon owners got nervous.
I think stylists and salon owners are nervous again right now because it feels like the world is changing.
And whenever the world changes or consumer behavior changes, we get scared and we don’t want to mess with our prices.
And I get it.
2018, man, the industry was popping off.
And so it’s interesting to me that you said that was kind of where you stalled.
I invite you just for a moment.
I promise I’m going to give you some coaching, but I want to do a little mindset work first.
I encourage you to think about what was going through your mind as you looked around at the industry in 2018.
I’m going to wage a guess and I could be totally wrong.
In 2018, you had to have an internet presence to continue to be relevant and growing at a strong pace as a stylist or salon owner.
By 2018, at least in the coaching I was giving and the stylists I was seeing that were doing really well financially in the salons that were growing really fast, there was always a digital footprint.
And when I say digital footprint, it’s the marketing funnel I coached to, right?
So we’re talking website, we’re talking social media.
Now I coach to online reviews and all of these things.
The world by 2018 had changed.
So all of that really came into inception more like 2015, 2016.
By 2018, that current was strong.
My guess, if I had to wage a guess, and maybe you didn’t even realize it at the time, is that you looked around at the way that the industry was changing.
And you said, I’m not going to do all that for whatever reason.
And no judgment there.
You said, I’m not going to do all that.
I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing.
I like my people.
And maybe you said, in my community, it doesn’t matter or my clients don’t care or I’m happy where I’m at.
For whatever reason, you decided you weren’t going to go down that path.
And I know you decided that because you told me here, I don’t advertise or do social media.
So you’re saying you consistently get new referrals.
Your schedule stays quite full.
Not 100% sure what that means, but you work too many hours.
And you love your career.
Your salon is busy.
You’re working with peers who are running the business kind of the same way that you do, but you’re embarrassed and tired of the insecurity and guilt of doing business.
So my guess is the guilt piece is coming from raising prices on your clients.
I’m going to guess you serve a clientele that doesn’t have an endless revenue stream.
And so you don’t want to price gouge them.
You’re thankful for the business that they’ve given to you.
When you talk about insecurity, I’m going to guess that’s coming from you.
You’re tired.
You’re working lots of long hours.
And you’re kind of what I classify as that sacrifice stylist where the hours and the time don’t make the money worth it.
There’s a break that’s happening there.
So, I’m going to guess the reason why you stalled out at 2018 is because the world around you changed and you chose to kind of stay in that early 2000s business model.
And now at this crossroads, you’re like, this is not sustainable, which I totally agree.
Totally agree.
I did a little research and I started with the Bureau of Labor and Statistics Inflation Calculator.
I love this little tool.
If you’re similar to this stylist, you can Google search Bureau of Labor and Statistics Inflation Calculator.
It will come right up.
And I took a look.
Now, I don’t know what this stylist’s price point is.
So I just threw some numbers out there.
I’m going to toss lots of numbers out today.
If this stylist’s average ticket in 2018 was 50 bucks, that $50 has the same buying power as $65.07 in 2025.
Do you know what I mean?
So I think about that.
Like if you were to give somebody a $50 tip or 50 bucks in a birthday card back in 2018, if you wanted that same buying power now, you’d have to give $65.
So if grandma has given you 20 bucks in the birthday card every year for the past 30 years, 20 bucks 30 years ago could take you places.
20 bucks now is like what?
Lunch or something maybe at a kind of like a mediocre place, like probably not a sit down restaurant.
It doesn’t go as far.
So when you look at buying power, even if your clientele from 2018 to now stayed exactly the same, your clients are getting the deal of a lifetime because their buying power, no matter what their financial situation is, increased by 25% from 2018 to 2025.
Meanwhile, your prices stayed the same.
So with every year that passes, you become more of a discount stylist, more of a discount stylist, more of a discount stylist, compounded with the fact that you love education, you’re passionate about what you do, you have 30 years of skills, and you discount yourself more and more and more every year.
You are a dream because I am getting all of that knowledge, all of that education at a fraction of the cost.
Of course, you’re booked and busy.
I want to talk mainstream for a minute about another business who did the same thing and is now in big trouble.
How many of you are familiar with Macy’s?
It’s a department store.
And as I said this, probably a lot of you were like, oh my gosh, it’s Macy’s.
It’s the same thing.
So Macy’s has experienced a decline in both net sales and comparable sales.
In the first quarter of 2025, net sales were down 6.5 percent from where they were in 2024.
And by the way, in 2024, sales were also down.
They’ve been on a decline and the decline keeps getting deeper and it keeps getting deeper and harder because of this buying power issue that this stylist is facing as well.
Because of all this, Macy’s made a statement and they said that they are implementing a bold new chapter and this is basically a restructure of the company that they’re calling bold new chapter that includes closing 66 stores, cutting 2,350 jobs, and listen to this, focusing on smaller format stores and our luxury brand Bloomingdale’s.
That was interesting to me.
How many of you are familiar with Bloomingdale’s?
When I say Bloomingdale’s, what do you think?
You think expensive, you think luxury.
Macy’s owns Bloomingdale’s.
Macy’s is the parent company.
Similar to the fact that, did you all know that Marriott is the parent company of Ritz-Carlton?
Same, same.
So similar set up.
So what Macy’s said is the format that we were using that was successful for decades, by the way, no longer works and we’re pivoting focus to our luxury brand.
How many of you have heard me talk about the great divide?
I started talking about the great divide in 2022.
So I’ve been talking about for three years now, we are deep in it at this point.
And what I’ve always said was, the people who are gonna feel the great divide the most are the middle class, like this stylist.
Luxury, not gonna feel it.
Luxury is gonna be fine.
Economy, not gonna feel it.
Economy is gonna be fine.
To this stylist, in the great divide, my opinion is that service providers kind of need to decide, are you gonna sway economy or sway luxury?
By the way, luxury doesn’t mean fancy diamonds, Four Seasons.
It’s a little different than that.
You’re basically backsliding into economy, and I don’t know that that was your intention, but that’s kind of what’s happening, and that’s why you’re staying booked and busy.
And I have a feeling you had a sense that in order to fight forward, you were gonna have to modernize and do the website and the social media, which is why you kind of hit pause, and instead try to stay frozen in time.
Macy’s did the same, and it is biting them big.
So if you look at Macy’s stock, like on the New York Stock Exchange, they peaked twice in 2007, which was right before the economy crashed, and then in 2015, in 2015, they were at the highest they’ve ever been.
Now, their stock price is down to where it was in 1996.
They have crashed extremely hard.
And when you look at studies about what the heck happened, it’s a series of unfortunate events mostly triggered by them choosing to stay the same instead of evolving forward.
So what they decided to do was switch from more desirable brands and on-trend brands to house brands.
More of the stuff they would do is like their own house brand.
You know what I mean?
Like when you go to Target, I think A New Day is a house brand versus the Mossimo, which is not a house brand, right?
When you go and you’re shopping in their home section, they have Magnolia, right?
That is not a house brand.
That is somebody’s brand who has been featured in the store versus Target also has their own brand of all kinds of different things.
Whenever a store sells their own house brand of anything, oh, a grocery store.
Well, you know how you can go and buy an organic Strauss Farm thing of sour cream and it’s five bucks or six bucks or whatever, or you can buy the Vons brand or the Safeway brand and it’s half the price.
That’s house brand.
It’s cheaper to produce.
It’s cheaper to put on the shelves so you can sell it for cheaper.
Macy’s decided to go low price leader and unfortunately, that’s not what their market wanted.
When Macy’s was at its prime, it was the place where a lot of brides went to register for their weddings, right?
Because you could go there and you could get a mattress and you could get a China set and you could get a new purse if you wanted to.
It was almost like they had a little bit of everything, kind of like Target before Target was Target.
But then the problem was Target did it better than Macy’s did because Macy’s stalled out.
So when you look at brands like Walmart and Target, for all the challenges Target’s been facing, they’re still opening new stores.
They’re still growing forward.
Macy’s is sliding back.
So what happened was Macy’s started leaning into things like star rewards and discounts and house brands and cheaper.
And the way that they became seen, I want you to think about like, how do you see Macy’s in your eye?
When’s the last time you went in there to buy something?
It just feels dated.
It feels like somebody who’s looking for a bargain goes there.
And you have to ask yourself, like, is that how you want to be seen in your salon?
If not, we have to innovate forward.
We have to.
When you look at a business like a Toys R Us, I’ve talked about them before too, they declared bankruptcy.
Why?
Because people stopped going to Toys R Us and just went to Amazon and to Target.
And when there were studies done about like, yeah, but why didn’t people go to toysrus.com?
Do you know what the only reason people were not buying from toysrus.com was?
There was one reason.
Toysrus.com was the only site that didn’t offer free shipping.
They could have raised their prices and offered free shipping, but they didn’t do it to the point of bankruptcy.
It’s kind of like what you’re doing with your price point right now.
You’re not modernizing forward.
And so because of that, we get left in the past and we continue to work hard and hard and hard and grind.
And yeah, you will continue to get discount clientele, but because the buying power has decreased, unless your income is growing year over year, your lifestyle is declining along with the prices that are staying the same.
So going back to what you said, I don’t even know where to start.
I want you to listen to episode 221.
It’s called The Seven Factors of Determining Your Price Point.
And we talk about how to balance those factors to determine what your price point should be.
So the factors I hit are local annual income, maximum available service hours, the services you offer, total guests you see in a month, how far you’re booked out, total monthly referrals, and your product costs.
And we balance that against timing.
So please notice I didn’t say how many years you’ve been in the industry, how many certifications you have.
It doesn’t count anymore.
There was a time where it did, it doesn’t.
Now, the other caveat to that is I never suggest any stylist raise prices unless you have a marketing strategy in place.
So generally speaking, the rate in which you raise your prices is directly equivalent to the risk of clientele loss.
So if you raise your prices by 25 percent, you have 25 percent of your clientele at risk for not choosing to work with you anymore.
You know, when I’m looking at a submission like this, and this is just a pro tip for anybody else who wants to submit a submission, submit a submission, submit a question in the future to the podcast.
If you leave your Instagram handle or your website in the rating or review on iTunes, sometimes I’ll give you a little funnel review and a little extra feedback.
Unfortunately, for this stylist, I wasn’t able to dig in any deeper.
It’s hard for me to be able to tell if your clientele would handle a significant price increase well.
One of the things I generally say is almost always you can raise by 5% or 10% if earned.
Not just blindly do it, but if earned, if the seven factors are there and it’s time, you can raise by 5% to 10% with a pretty solid tolerance and come out net positive on the flip side.
Some stylists I coach are raising their prices 30% or more every year and are still coming out net positive, but not all.
And that’s why we want to look at the seven factors.
Now, here’s the thing.
This style hasn’t raised their prices since 2018.
So we know that the buying power has increased by 25% since then.
So we know this stylist is at minimum 25% underpriced, but she could very well be 100% underpriced.
We don’t know, because we’ve not run her through the seven factors.
We don’t know if she was underpriced back then.
We don’t know what her demand really looks like right now.
So it’s difficult to say.
We’re like taking shots in the dark.
But let’s just take a look at that 25%.
So if this stylist had an average ticket of $70 and worked 32 hours a week, took two weeks vacation a year, and the average guest was in their chair for 90 minutes.
I think those are all relatively median level responses.
So let’s say $70 is the average ticket, 32 hours a week, two weeks vacation a year, average guest is in the chair for 90 minutes.
So it’s a mix of cut and color, an average price point there.
This stylist would see 21 clients a week.
They’d be working 50 weeks a year.
They would do about $73,000 in services annually, figure a 50% profit margin.
So a stylist like that would take home $36,000 a year.
So let’s assume that that stylist in 2018 was priced perfectly and the scenario I just ran through was their scenario.
So assuming that they’ve been marketing themselves and their demand is justified and all of that kind of stuff, if they were to just raise their prices to market value because of the buying power shift, they would increase their take home pay by $9,000.
They’d go from $36,000 a year take home to $45,000 a year take home.
Just by increasing to buying power trajectory standards, nothing else.
Now, I’m not saying that’s what this stylist should do.
Again, I think this stylist needs to look at the seven factors and see where they’re actually at.
But man, if that doesn’t burn, because if this stylist had just done a 3.5% annual raise, they would have been right here.
They would have been making $9,000 more than they are right now.
Ouch, that hurts.
And that’s less than a $3 increase average per ticket.
That zings a lot.
But let’s assume this person didn’t just miss some of the price increase markers that would have happened between now and seven years ago.
And let’s say that with their demand and where their business is, they really should be priced 50% higher than where they are now.
Pricing them properly would put them at $56,000 annual take home pay.
So, an additional $20,000 a year.
That would change the stylist’s life.
And so, to this stylist who, for whatever reason, in 2018 kind of decided to hit pause, I don’t want you to feel badly about that decision, but I want you to think about the version of you that existed in 2018 and maybe choose to let that person go and say, okay, what does the 2025 version of me want?
What do they need?
I’ve lived the life where I didn’t increase my prices.
Look around at your reality and ask yourself, how would you feel if you made an extra 20 grand this year?
How would that change your life?
How would that change your schedule?
How would that change your overwhelm and your guilt and the insecurity and all the other things, right?
Now, as I’m saying this, I don’t want anybody walking away saying, oh, Britt mentioned everybody should increase their prices by 3.5% annually.
I do not believe that.
I do not believe in standardized annual increases.
I have watched that kill stylists’ business.
I have watched salons.
If you work at a salon where they do, January 1st, everybody gets a raise.
That is some of the most irresponsible business decision making I’ve ever seen.
I don’t know of any other successful company who operates like that.
I don’t believe you should just eat the cost when the cost of operating your business goes up.
But I think that there is a whole side of that conversation we’re skipping.
And when we do automatic price increases, you can cause an already struggling stylist to now have an Achilles heel and be dragged backwards, and you’ve just made their job harder.
They were already struggling, and now you’ve given them an additional hurdle to overcome.
I don’t believe psychologically it makes sense.
I don’t think tactically it makes sense.
So no, I’m not saying everybody should just get an automatic annual increase.
But I think we do need to take price increases really seriously.
And when you have years where you haven’t earned an increase, we have to ask why.
Because any year that you do not earn an increase, the economy is outpacing you.
That is simply the reality, right?
So to this stylist who asked and said, I haven’t done a price increase since 2018, where do I start?
That was the initial question.
I want you to use a pricing calculator or some kind of tool so that you know what your price target should be today.
And then I want you to think about what your risk tolerance is.
If you were to, let’s say, raise your prices by 5% and let’s say you did lose 5% of your clientele, you’d be losing 14 guest visits per year and you’d essentially be at a net net.
So you wouldn’t gain anymore.
You wouldn’t lose anymore.
But maybe you’d be working a little bit less and that would feel fine for you.
Now does every stylist lose clients when they raise their prices?
No, but when I look at the ones who grow on the flip side, they do have marketing.
They do.
So it is something to consider.
I want you to listen to podcast episode 331.
It’s called The Price and Crisis and How We Got Here.
I think that’s going to be a really good listen for you.
I want you to seriously consider a marketing strategy before you raise.
You don’t have to become an Instagram influencer.
I don’t coach to anybody becoming one.
I know too many broke influencers to be pushing people that direction.
But I really think modernizing your marketing could be massive for you.
And it doesn’t have to feel heavy.
If it feels heavy and exhausting, we’re probably not doing it correctly.
So creating a sustainable strategy that will drive more clients to your chair, make you feel confident in your price point, and allow you to just kind of ease the pressure a little bit.
I think that would be huge.
When you do decide to raise your prices, skip the emails, skip the social media posts, skip the apologies, skip the station talkers.
Just let your clients know, hey, I know you’ve been paying $75 for your root touch up, next time it’s gonna be $80.
And it’s just simple.
The less emotional and the less heavy you make it, the less emotional and the less heavy your clients are gonna take it.
And I think especially for a stylist like this who hasn’t raised their prices in seven years, a lot of your clients are gonna say congratulations.
And they’re gonna be excited for you.
If you need any other tools or guidance as you navigate this journey, you can always leave me another rating or review on iTunes, find me in the DMs on Instagram, as I always say, so much love.
Happy business building and I’ll see you on the next one.
