They Aren’t Paying for the Haircut

For a handful of years before the pandemic, my wife and I ran a busy hair salon in Denver. She is a virtuoso stylist and practiced empath. I dragged in my assortment of skills—writing, editing, marketing, experience design, rudimentary plumbing—to balance out our business endeavor. As far as salons go, we had a good run.

There were plenty of obvious design tasks: create a logo, design an intuitive website that was elegant but spoke to each of our stylist’s offerings and personality, put together a social media plan that fit the brand, connect external booking apps into our webflows, tune the physical flow of waiting, browsing product, and checking out. The bigger challenge was understanding how service design applied to something with so many soft edges. What we called services on our website—haircuts, bang trims, balayage and baby lights—were the products. The service was the time clients spent with their stylist, and how the product and service lived out in the world.

The Product Is Only Part of the Service

A finished cut and color might be exactly what the customer wants at the end of an appointment. The next day, however, an off-hand remark might make them question it. The product leaves the salon and becomes highly mutable—subject to how the customer styles their hair, how confident they feel wearing it, and how the world reacts to it.

As Ben Reason, co-founder of Livework, the world’s first service design agency, notes, “We think about a service as having a lifecycle … Often the banks will talk about a product, let’s say a mortgage or a loan is a product, the service is everything that happens before, during and after you engage with that product.”

Stylists don’t typically have opportunities to tend to their product once the person leaves their chair. If the product doesn’t elicit the response they were hoping for, the client might decide the problem is in the eye of the beholder, not with the product. The ability to shrug off a neutral-sounding “it looks great” often hinges on how the client views the stylist.

The Relationship Is the Service

Some stylists will go ahead and give people the product they are asking for, even when they know it’s not the right fit. This might complete the transaction, but an ill-coiffed customer out in the world can cause collateral damage.

Stylists who are honest with their clients, setting expectations going into a new look are providing a more durable service. They will live with the temporary discomfort of telling a client when an inspiration photo won’t work with their hair texture, or face shape. The client who hears this and then gets a product that does indeed make them look and feel their best—even if it’s not what they came in asking for—is more likely to remain a satisfied customer.

Clients who trust their stylists are also more likely to buy the right tools, sprays, and elixirs to maintain their new “product,” book a follow-up appointment to maintain it, and talk about where they got it done while wearing it confidently. In that sense, the core of a successful salon service is—as with a bank—building a relationship of trust.

Time and Empathy Build Knowledge and Trust

We called our salon Needle in the Hay because, for most people, finding the right stylist was like finding the sliver of metal in the proverbial stack. It was a bit like matching personas. Some stylists move through life like celebrities with wild stories to tell. There are clients who love to listen to those stories and the product is touched by their perception of being in the presence of someone cool and popular.

Other stylists like to ask a few key questions and work quietly, which suits guests who like to bring a computer and work the whole time. Some stylists, like my wife, are as good at listening and processing information as they are at styling hair. The services they provide go beyond cut and color. They become life coaches and confidants. They build the levels of trust that lead to clients saying things like, “I haven’t told my therapist this yet, but …”

As Seth Godin points out, “if we get back to first principles, [as a doctor] the purpose of my interaction with this patient is not to make me feel smart. The purpose is for them to feel better … doctors miss it all the time, because the only person who’s in the room with you every time you go to see a patient is you. So you’re thinking a lot about how it feels to be you.”

The most successful stylists want to make people feel better about themselves. They know their craft, work to build trust, and spend time thinking about how it feels to be in their chair.

Our Job Was Empowering Stylists

We opened Needle in the Hay to try and recreate the magic of the salon my wife worked in when we lived in Chicago. The space employed some of the most serious, technical stylists in the city, but it also felt like an epicenter of cool. There was always good music playing because the owner let the stylists play what they were into. The clientele varied from struggling artists getting haircuts in trade to some of the most successful restaurateurs in the city. Everyone was always learning from one another.

Clients liked being there because stylists liked working there and could be themselves. As Robb Wilson (CEO and Co-founder of OneReach) says, “if you start with service design, start with the employees, because happy employees are how you get happy customers.”

You can’t just hire a bunch of cool, talented people and open the door. You have to establish and maintain the culture. You can’t be a tourist. Even though I was more comfortable working at home on my computer, I had to walk the room. I swept hair, fixed leaking sinks, and talked with stylists and their guests. By doing this, I learned how stylists delivered difficult truths to clients. How they spoke honestly with solidarity, and how some clients were never going to be happy no matter what we did. It was never frictionless, and the work never ended.

Understanding the nuance of products and services and the tangled existence they have outside your walls can empower you to find ways to build the trust in the short windows you have with customers. What one of our stylists would say holds true, “they aren’t paying for the haircut honey, they’re paying to hang out with you.”

Josh Tyson is a contributing editor at UX Magazine and host of Invisible Machines with Robb Wilson. This member essay draws on the S7E19 conversation with Ben Reason and Lavrans Løvlie, and on Seth Godin in You Are the Circumstances.