How To Choose A New Supplier For Your Beauty Business

I wanted to talk a little bit today about the three things that you should be thinking about when you’re looking at bringing a new brand into your business.

Because I think these are often overlooked.

And I found it myself, when I owned my spa, that what we would do is we’d be looking for a new brand and we go out and we’d Google every different skincare or nail care supplier out there.

And we’d read their website, we’d read all the bumf, and we’d try and find something that kind of fit in with what we were looking for.

However, sometimes what we failed to do was to strip back first and look what we wanted from our business – or look forward at what are goals were.

So I want to talk about the three most important things that you need to think about before you find a new supplier for your business.

Now, the very first thing really is your business goals.

Where you’re going in your business is going to determine the type of supplier you’re looking for.

If you’re working independently, you’re a one (wo)man band, then there are certain suppliers that are really set up to look after you.  If you go and work with one of the bigger companies, you’ll often find they don’t want to work with solopreneurs.

Alternatively, they, they might even cut off your supply at some point when you’ve invested in the initial outlay.

I’ve seen this happen recently quite a lot, and it’s obviously stressful for the salon owners.

So making sure that you know where your business is going, and how your journey is looking to you moving forward.

Your supplier needs to sit in an alignment with that, and they should be there to help you on the journey.

Ultimately, salon suppliers want you to be successful because the more successful you are then the more products and supplies you’re going to need from them.

So it’s very much in their interest that you do well.  Typically, they’ll do their best to help you, support you on that journey through training, through the marketing support that they give you, and helping to publicise the brand as much as possible.

But this will only work if you know what your goals are as a business.

And when I say goals, I mean, where are you looking to be in six months, a year, five years?

Are you looking to grow?  Are you looking to have multiple salons?  Are you looking to stay as you are?  Are you looking to make your business smaller?

So you need to know where your business is going.

But you also need to know exactly what you want to do in your business.

If you think of skincare suppliers, they go all the way from very, very small companies offering inexpensive products, all the way up to huge international brands that offer very high end treatments.

So you need to work out where you sit in that scale.

Because what you’re going to be offering, the brand that you bring into your business is going to sit as part of the representation of who you are as a company.

We often look for salons that offer the brands that we are interested in.

So think about that when you’re looking for your supplier.

The second thing that it’s important to think about is what your clients goals are.

There is simply no point bringing in an anti-ageing treatment brand, if your clients are all under 25.

They’re not going to be purchasing the products, and they’re not going to be booking the treatments. And likewise, if you’ve got an older market and a mature market that you work with, you’re going to wanting to be looking for the companies that specialise in anti ageing, or whatever it is you plan to offer.

Likewise, you also need to know your financial goals of business as well.

Some suppliers out there, the RRP of their treatments are at incredibly high prices.

And if you’ve got big financial goals, you want to be looking for the higher ticket items in your business.

You want to be selling the £200-300 facials, the £850 electrical facials and not the £25 pound facials.

So that’s also going to be represented in the brand that you choose.

So, be sure to know exactly where you’re going, what you want to get out of your business and what you want to offer your clients before you even start thinking about putting yourself out to the different suppliers.

There are literally hundreds out there so make sure they’re in alignment with what it is that you want to achieve as a salon owner.

Hollie xx

Prefer to watch the video version?

You might also enjoy this article written by Hollie for theSource –

How Do I Know When It’s Time To Find A New Brand?

Photo by Alex Bertha on Unsplash