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
What is up? And welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and I decided to do something really different today. This is a very inspired episode for me in the sense that I just participated in something kind of interesting where I gained a lot of perspective on different approaches to coaching and different way coaching companies work and different way educators work and stuff like that. And one of the things I found to be interesting is that in Thriver Society and in the way that I coach, the strategies I coach too are changing constantly because the market is changing constantly and clients are changing constantly and trends are changing constantly and, you know, as change happens, I have to change too. And so our training programs, Thriver Society and Thriving Leadership, Thriving Stylist Method has changed six times and Thriving Leadership Method has changed three times twice in the last 18 months.
So pretty significant overhauls all the time. And there was a comment left on one of my posts, like a couple months back, and I didn’t think much of it until I had this, you know, secondary kind of experience. And the comment that was left a couple months back is like, “Brit, I find it so interesting that you’re saying this because this is exactly the opposite of what I know you were coaching to four years ago.” And the way that the comment was made was coming from a place of like, “Oop, you changed your mind, you can’t do that. ” And I actually think it’s like completely irresponsible for coaches not to change perspective. And it’s not that I changed my mind. I don’t have my mind made up about any specific strategy. There’s strategies I was obsessed with and loved 10 years ago that just don’t work.
So it doesn’t matter how much I like it or how cool I think it is. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. And so, yeah, I’m sure that I have changed our coaching strategy on a ton of different concepts over the years. That’s my whole job is to change and adapt as the industry changes and adapts. And I think that we do a really good job here on the podcast of talking about what we suggest stylists do, do. But I don’t know that I’d done an episode where I’m like, let’s candidly talk about the things that I once thought were great ideas that just don’t work any longer. They became ineffective or they just started working against the market. I wanted to dedicate an episode to the things that used to work that don’t. For a lot of different reasons, one, we just welcomed in several hundred new Thriving Stylist Method members.
If you are one of them, welcome. We’re so excited to have you. You’ve breathed a new energy into the community and it’s so much fun. Of those, you know, quote unquote new Thriving Stylist Method members, 31% are returning members. So people who had been members of Thriving Stylist Method before and are coming back. And it’s been interesting to watch people say, “Whoa, I was in this a few years ago and everything has changed.” Yeah, because the market has changed. Like think about how the industry operated in 2015 versus now. It’s night and day you can’t even compare. So if anybody is still following any kind of strategies or ideas they learned from me years ago, I wanna give a chance to like kind of catch you up and think about the things that may need a chance to be phased out of your business. And I also wanna gain some clarity and insight around strategies that I still see floating around from other, I’m gonna say like voices in the industry that I just, I feel like it’s kinda like bad advice.
And I, I just wanna give my take on some of the things I think are worth taking a look at and just questioning in your business. So the first and most obvious strategy that we once coached to here at, at Thriving Styles Method that we don’t coach to anymore is hashtags. And hashtags phased out of our training years back, like several updates of Thriving Stylus method back. We could see that they were losing their effectiveness and their efficiency. When you talk about hashtags, hashtags were introduced on the Instagram platform specifically as a search feature. So what would happen is if you remember Instagram from like a decade ago, people would go into the search bar and search SanFranciscoBlonding or BayAreaStylist, and it was almost like a way of indexing yourself within the platform. What happened first was Instagram users just stopped doing it.
They weren’t using hashtag search as much for several reasons, one being that Instagram added their explore page and their algorithm became more sophisticated, and now we’re having like suggested posts show up on our feed without even trying. The other thing is, Instagram usership is significantly down, as reported by Instagram itself, and we are finding that less consumers are using Instagram to find local small business and are leaning into other platforms like Google or ChatGPT or Reddit or Yelp or Nextdoor app, platforms that are specifically made for local small business. So as both of those trends kind of took place, Instagram actually made a very public statement. I believe it was 2025, it could have been 2024, where they said, and we are phasing out hashtags completely. It doesn’t mean that you can’t use them. It means that, that Instagram itself is no longer indexing your content that way.
It won’t help you to show up on the explore page. They said that they find that users are not using them as search terms. So what happens is if you’re still using hashtags on your photos or your videos, you just look behind the times. Like it looks like you aren’t modern, you haven’t kept up, you don’t know how things work. It’s like grandma or grandpa are using Instagram. Look at how cute it is. It just, it’s sending the wrong message to your client. So if you’re still using hashtags at all, I would suggest phasing those out. They’re not doing anything for you and there is a chance they’re working against you, so get rid of them completely.
Which leads into strategy number two that we pulled out was long form captions. So in Thriving Stylus Method, we used to have these caption guides. We never did the caption prompts. What I found to be interesting is there were a lot of like caption prompt guides floating around the industry where it’s kind of like fill in the blank or here’s a place to start and then you kind of fill in your own thing. But the problem I found for many stylists is they were like, “If I could just fill in my own thing, I would be doing that already. I need the entire caption.” So we had these guides where we wrote out full captions. They were like 60 page guides where you can just kind of like copy paste and you could edit things if you wanted to, but it was basically fully fleshed out.
We haven’t produced one of those in a long time. Somebody just in our community was like, “Are you gonna make an, an update in one of those?” And the answer is no, because long form captions aren’t working like they used to. The average Instagram user is not reading captions the way they were and Instagram has data to support that. The picture or the video kind of has to be worth a thousand words because that’s where the user is focusing their attention. That doesn’t mean captions are garbage. Captions are used for context, but you kind of have to be punchy, like short and sweet and to the point. It’s not like a creative writing assignment anymore. It’s more like, “Here’s the point of this photo and this video.” You don’t phrase it just like that. I’m, I’m paraphrasing, but you kind of get down to business in the caption.
The other thing that captions are used for now is that’s how the algorithm is indexing your content. It’s able to skim the photo or the video as well. Like there’s so much sophistication to these algorithms at this point, but they’re also looking at the caption and looking at the keywords that you put there and saying, “Ah, this is what this person is trying to get across.” That being said, do not keyword stuff into your captions. That’s gonna force you right out of the algorithm. So when you’re writing captions now, you just wanna write straighten to the point. It doesn’t have to be fluffy. We still wanna stay away from captions that talk about hair-like food, like butterscotch blonde or, you know, brunettes for the holidays. Like all of that kind of fluffy stuff is still not effective. But when you are making a post about a photo or a video, using that text in a smart, responsible way to help index your content and also help the user understand what it is you’re trying to demonstrate in this post is how we like to use captions and we like them to be shorter and sweeter.
Usually about three sentences takes the cake. So anything less than that is probably not enough, anything more. It’s like you’re turning into a creative writing assignment, so punchier, more effective captions are what’s happening now. Next, online booking forms, and this is something that some … I think, if I can remember correctly, when I was talking earlier about the, the comment that was made on one of my Instagram posts who said, “I think it’s really interesting that now you’re coaching against this thing that once you coached towards, yeah, I mean, our programs evolve for sure.” The reason why we shifted away from online booking forms is overwhelming client feedback on them, that it felt like too many hoops to jump through. And when online booking forms became popular, it was in response to the artificial inflation that the industry experienced from 2020 to 2023. It only was for about two years and then it subsided and now we have more.
It’s very interesting. I always use the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics for my, um, data on the industry, and so you can look it up yourself if you want. The industry is growing. There are a ton of stylists providing services right now, so the need to like deeply screen clients and have all of these like restrictions and what it looks like to be in business with us, it gave clients a really bad taste in their mouth and it slowed growth. And so what clients started doing, we saw this huge pattern is they were like, “The harder you make it for me to book with you, I’m just gonna book with somebody who makes it easy.” Unless you are a stylist who is in extremely high demand, online booking forms that clients need to fill out before they can get on your books, can get in to come to see you will only hold you back.
There is one lesson in Thriving Stylist Method that does still talk about online booking forms, and the advice given in there is, if you are booked and busy, and you really don’t want to be taking on an abundance of new clients, you just want maybe two or three new guests a month, if you wanna have forms, you can probably be screening people out of your business and it makes sense, no harm, no foul, because you’re gonna lose some interest in your business, but no worries because you’re already booked and busy, so you can’t take on that much. In that case, it usually works. At scale, it’s not working. And I’ve coached stylists now for two years to pull back on forms, and we just had another share in our Thriving Sales Method community on Friday, which for me is two days ago, saying, “Wow, I pulled the forms and got seven new guest
Now, forms are something that I definitely coached to in Thriving Stylist Method from 2015 until about 2017 or 2018. And what I coached them as at the time was an alternative to online booking. Online booking at the time I was coaching to that was very new to the industry. There was only a few digital booking platforms available for stylists, I wanna say less than five, like very few and then a few more kind of in development and in their infancy. Now there’s over 20, probably closer to 40 online booking systems that stylists can choose from when they’re looking t- uh, for what kind of software they wanna use to run their book of business. So at the time when I started coaching, the idea of using a form instead of having a client book on their own was kind of like allowing clients to navigate digital booking with training wheels on.
It was not for the stylist, it was very much for the client because we had to kind of train clients to this idea of, “No, you don’t have to text me. You don’t have to call me. There’s a way that works better for both of us.” When I was coaching to online forms, it was like the training wheels time, the baby steps where it was like, let’s get clients used to booking online. Fast forward to now 2026, there’s not much you cannot book online. I can order a Jamba juice online. I can book a doctor’s appointment online. I can book all of my travel online, my hotel online. I book everything freaking online. There’s not much I don’t do online. So when I was coaching the forms 10 years ago, it totally made sense. It doesn’t make sense anymore. They’ve been pulled out of our coaching.
The only time we suggest them is, again, like I said, stylists who are already overly booked and busy and really do wanna cherry pick the clients that they work with. It’s a very much like a luxury problem, like a more money, more problem situation, but in that instance it works, otherwise we’ve pulled those out completely. Next, let’s talk about loyalty and rewards programs and apps. This is another kind of like OG, thriving stylus method strategy. We used to coach to several different types of rewards programs. We did punch cards, stamp cards, we did digital. There was, there was a really cool digital rewards app. It only, unfortunately only had a short lifespan, which we’ll touch on in a minute as to why that happened, but we coached to these rewards programs where it was like with more frequency, clients were getting stamps or punches or digital rewards, and then if they took part in certain services or purchased a certain amount of retail, they would get something back.
Not unlike a Sephora rewards program or an Ulta rewards program. I know Nordstrom’s has their rewards pram. Starbucks is probably the, one of the most popular rewards programs. Most people like to pay for Starbucks on their phone because by doing so, you are racking up points. Like it goes to your Starbucks account, you get free drinks and all that kind of stuff. We stepped away from all loyalty and rewards programs completely because we saw that there was no longer data to support that it was increasing revenue for stylists and salon owners. And in fact, we actually saw it make a decrease. So there was a time when it was trendy amongst customers to have rewards programs. That was coming out of more like 2012, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, when we were still recovering from the recession. Now, that recession is nothing like the economic state that we’re facing right now, not at all.
The economic recession of 2008, 2009 was based on housing crisis. We are not in a housing crisis far from it. And what became popular was couponing and discounts. We are not seeing a shift in consumer behavior back to couponing and discounts at this crossroads. So rewards programs and earning, you know, Kohl’s cash, which Kohl’s is a struggling business. I mean, we could talk about that too, but Kohl’s Cash like leveraged that department store for a long time because rewards programs and earning points and all of that was on trend. It is no longer on trend at scale and you don’t see people chasing that. So what is happening is I’m watching stylists and salons trying to make these like loyalty and rewards programs take flight. You’re fighting consumer behavior. You’re not doing what’s on trend or what’s popular. So as I say that, I want you to think to yourself like, what are the rewards programs that you are a part of that you like?
Think about it, because there’s, there might be some. Like I mentioned Starbucks. If you’re a Starbucks drinker, you know, 80% chance you have it, because it’s kind of like a no-brainer. I also think of Sephora and my Rouge points and all that kind of stuff. Both of those programs and any rewards program trades on volume and frequency. Unless you own a blow dry bar, you’re not trading on volume and frequency. You can try to get your root touch up clients to come in every four weeks, you’re fighting consumer behavior. So if you’re not increasing volume and consistency, all you’re doing is discounting your business. Starbucks can make somebody give five lattes in a week instead of two. I don’t know about you. I get the notifications that say, “Hey, complete this challenge. If you come in this week and buy two breakfast items and two coffees, you’ll get triple rewards.” That does work.
We cannot afford to do that. The profit margin on a Starbucks coffee and the profit margin on our services are, is not comparable. And don’t even get me started on the profit margin on retail. Like there is none to play with. Like there’s no room for error there. We simply cannot play the same game. When you look at a rewards program like a Sephora, again, it’s based on volume, but what are they doing? They’re, they’re creating sales and opportunities to push more at scale and push more volume. And what are the rewards that you get by earning the points? You get things like free shipping, you get little free gifts. I don’t know about you. It’s been a long time since I got a good free gift. And the only reason like I worry about the rewards program is I want the free shipping. The rest is kind of like whatever for me.
They’re offering things that you cannot offer. I want you to think of what rewards programs that you’re a part of that really pay you back, that you feel like the value is there and it’s so worth it for you, that are not trading on volume and frequency, which are two things that we simply cannot trade on in our industry unless you are a blow dry bar and you were to have a rewards program that was like, if you complete four blow drives in a month, then you get something. Other than that, all that happens is you discount and let me explain why. What I found is that most rewards programs were something like, come in five times and get a $20 gift card. Okay, so then all you’ve done there is you’ve reduced the value of every single service they come in for by $4, because if they’ve come in five times, now you’re giving them a $20 credit, you’ve cut your pay.
I have to be honest with you, like if it takes a $20 bribe to get somebody to come to you five times, like we’ve really lost the plot. I have to be candid, that $20 incentive is not enough to make somebody come to you five times. The reason they’re coming to you five times is something completely different than the $20 reward. It’s just not serving a purpose. So we pulled that out completely many, many years ago. It’s not something we coached to either. Next, online review contests, those we pulled out many years back, many years back, eight, nine, like a lot of years back we pulled out review contests. So we used to coach too, as a way to get clients to start leaving reviews, running promotions where it was like, you know, every client who leaves a review in the month of April gets entered to win a whatever.
That was again, an exercise that we were using to get people used to leaving reviews on platforms. Nobody needs to get used to it anymore. Consumer behavior has caught up. I am certain everybody listening to this podcast has left a review for some business at some point in time on some platform somewhere. We’re just conditioned to be talking about businesses and leading reviews about businesses. We don’t need to be conditioning our clients to do it anymore. And everybody’s take on online reviews has changed. We saw Google reviews go from like this random kind of like beta testing thing that Google was trying out to the number one deciding factor when people are looking for local, small business. Like Google reviews cannot be understated. There’s just nothing more important than it right now. Clients trust Google reviews in such a deep way. 10 years ago, they didn’t because it was like this new thing.
Google reviews are so really new. Yelp reviews are still even relatively new. So because these review platforms were kind of new and kind of iffy, there wasn’t a lot of trust in them. Now there’s a ton of trust in them. So what happens now is if you run a review contest, you’re disabling the trust because as soon as I come in to see you and I see that you’re running a review contest where it’s like, “Hey, leave me a review and, and you get a free treatment next time you come in or leave me a review and you get a discount or leave me a review and you’re entered to win something.” Now I look at all of the online reviews you have through a different perspective and I say, “Oh, those aren’t real feedback. That’s bribes.” So they bribed 200 people to talk nicely about the salon.
Now I trust you less. So we haven’t coached to online review contests in many, many years. That’s another thing that’s completely phased out of our programs. There’s probably other things, but I’m gonna lead into my last two that I wanna talk about, welcome packets and welcome gifts. Again, those were both things that trended really hard many, many years ago. Most businesses were doing it. A lot of service-based businesses were doing it. An example I always use was like the local veterinary office that I went to was doing it. Dental offices were doing it. Like a, a lot of people were doing these welcome packets, either digital or physical. We have shifted away from that, not just in Thriver Society, but like as a people, it’s a dated kind of strategy. We do still wanna have onboarding, but not in the form of a physical packet.
And the way that you would do a digital packet is a bit different as well. With the physical packet, I want you to think to yourself, how do you feel when somebody gives you a stack of papers to take home? Like overwhelmed, overwhelming. We’re moving into this like paperless society. And so when you give people like something to hold, somebody to carry, something to throw in their purse, a bunch of stuff to read, to your face, they’re gonna say, “Oh my gosh, thank you so much.” And then emotionally it lands as like, “Great, this is one more thing for me to do, one more thing for me to go through, one more thing for me to ultimately end up throwing away.” Now are they gonna say to your face, “Why are you giving this to me? I don’t need one more thing?” No, to your face, they’re gonna say like, “Thank you so much.” But in reality, the effectiveness and the efficiency is lost for the most part.
There’s just such better techniques and strategies to use now. So even if you’re like, “Oh, we do the welcome thing and it, and it works, I promise you that there’s things that work three times better.” It’s just dated. It’s not a modern strategy that we would coach to anymore. Same thing with like welcome gifts. There was something that we coached to years ago, included in the welcome packets where it was like a new guest would come in and you’d give them this like kind of goody pack and it said it take 20% off your next service visit with us. And then if they came in on their second visit, they could use that discount. Well, again, we’ve shifted completely away from coaching to discounts at all because again, we’re not living in like a coupon hungry consumer market that was of a time that was a decade ago.
And the other thing that we coached too was like a retail discount. Well, unfortunately now we’re living in a time where we’re competing against distributors in a way that we were not competing against distributors way back then. And so it again made more sense and you could have more margin and there was more opportunities to do things like that. We can’t leverage in that same way. So what ends up happening is the salon ends up just losing money and it is not incentive enough for clients to want to come back for more visits. Today’s consumer is so much more discerning that trying to like hook them in with a one-time discount or, you know, a free whatever at their next visit, they just want really good hair. And what they expect service-wise and communication-wise, they just want you to meet their expectations there. They don’t want you to add extra sprinkles and cherries and whipped cream on top.
They just want the ice cream to be good. Less is more. Simple is better. Get to the point, make it easy. Efficiency is so hot right now. So that was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight things that we have phased out of our coaching. If you have questions about any strategies you learned from us years ago or things that you’re thinking about phasing out or you’re wondering if they still work or anything like that, you can always leave me a rating or review on iTunes. I can do another episode like this if there’s anything else you have questions about. I’d more than happy to do it. Um, opportunity to just take a look at your business with fresh eyes and say, “Where are the ways that I can modernize? Where are the ways I can kind of catch up to where consumers are now so you can hopefully grow your business a little bit faster?” Okay, as I always say, so much love.
Happy business building and I’ll see you on the next one.
