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How customers are coping during lockdown

With many hairdressers, barbers, and beauty salons in lockdown, many business owners have had to pivot their brick-and-mortar model and explore new opportunities to keep their revenue flowing.

Snap lockdowns have become second nature in the post-Covid world, so exploring other ways of generating income is a great way to safeguard your business and ensure your business is lockdown-resilient.

How customers are coping during lockdown

To all our Shorties in lockdown right now, our heart goes out to you and your team and we are here to help you get through this incredibly tough time. To inspire you in a time that feels so uncertain, we have looked to some of our own – our Shortcuts heroes who are pushing forward in the face of adversity.

We have reached out to some of customers who have come up with innovative ideas to keep their business ticking along when they cannot physically be there for their clients.

Jade Pentony – Glow Beauty Space

Jade, from Glow Beauty Space in New South Wales, knew how challenging it was for the mums juggling everything and home-schooling their kids in lockdown. She started selling a fabulous TGIF kit on socials containing a gorgeous skin peel, professional hair treatment, organic polishing sponge and a complimentary bottle of wine. What a treat! Not only did she offer these fabulous kits, but she also gave back to her community by running weekly giveaways for her followers. Check out her experience below!

Glow Beauty Space

“Every day in lockdown is sort of different. The hardest thing is coming up with ideas that won’t eventually be there once this is all over. The best thing to do right now is remain positive, move forward and don’t get left behind. 

We started selling TGIF professional treatment packs with some of our products to help our mums in lockdown. As mothers we get to Friday thinking, oh god we made another week! Our TGIF professional treatment packs are designed to give you some time to yourself and get some ‘me-time’. 

We also did some weekly giveaways on our socials, to give back to the people who were supporting us. They went into a draw to win a hair gift or some skincare – we just want to give back to the people who are always there for us. 

My one piece of advice is to remain positive and know we are going to get out of this and be super busy at the end, inundated with appointments, avoid resting and stay focussed on not losing clients and figure out what they need even when we cannot physically be there.” – Jade Pentony, Owner of Glow Beauty Space

Check out Glow Beauty Space. 

Amy Zhao – QV Hair

Amy from QV Hair Salon in Victoria, was looking for her next big challenge in lockdown and realised all her in-salon hair products were just sitting there collecting dust on her shelves. Amy set out to create an online shop to sell these products and open up a new income stream that can stand the tests of any future lockdowns. She spent weeks watching free classes and seminars to learn how to use Shopify and Photoshop to create her online shop. Amy is about to launch her site and feels a new sense of purpose by being productive and learning something new in lockdown. Read Amy’s inspirational journey below.

Amy Zhao - QV Hair

“After the 6th lockdown I did not know when this would end, or what was my purpose? To fill my time and feel that sense of purpose again, I wanted to create an online shop with all my salon hair products, so I thought I should learn how to create an e-commerce Shopify store. I started doing a lot of free classes and seminars to learn the Shopify platform. It felt fun and like I was progressing every day, which I had not felt in a while. Naomi, the Google Advisor at Shortcuts, shared with me some other websites that are doing well in the hair and beauty space. The first version took me 2-3 weeks to finish, then after reviewing other people’s sites, it only took me 2 days. Shopify was so easy to use to customise my site – after editing my site for weeks it became like muscle memory. I showed my friends and they thought it was amazing! Creating the store gave me a sense of achievement that I needed. 

Salons are all about clients coming into your salon with hair that needs some love. After seeing us they leave feeling and looking amazing – you cannot help but feel a sense of achievement every time. When you’re in lockdown you’ve lost that feeling, and with my online store I feel that again. Once I started to learn something every day, I felt like I was not wasting my time, I felt like I was working and being useful. A lot of people in lockdown end up wasting time on social media or playing games – but one way you can become a better person is to utilise your time to learn something new. Melbourne is like a person, it’s sick at the moment, but it’s going to get better.” 

Check out QV hair salon. 

Julia Crowley – Snip Into

Julia Crowley, from Snip Into in New South Wales, was feeling the stresses of lockdown on her business and team. To keep her team connected and positive she’s hosted virtual trivia nights to boost her team’s morale. She also noticed her customers were messaging her to buy products, so her and her business partner Brooke, came up with a genius click & collect system for customers to get their hair, beauty and body products. Check out Julia and Brooke’s incredible lockdown story below.

Julia Crowley – Snip Into

“New South Wales lockdown has been pretty stressful. To keep our team engaged and in high spirits, we have a team Facebook page where we can keep in touch with each other. We’ve also tried things like virtual trivia nights hosted on zoom which the team really enjoyed. We also regularly share knowledge and education tips in our Facebook page to help our stylists brush up on their skills whilst in lockdown. It’s a great place to communicate with everyone where they get to read it in their own time.

To cope with lockdown, you need to be doing something productive to keep the connection with your clients. Besides home-schooling I didn’t have anything to do with the business but I wanted to do something to keep busy. I noticed people were emailing or sending us a DM to buy some products from us. I knew there was an opportunity here to sell products but didn’t want to pay someone to set-up an online shop. Therefore, I learnt how to build one myself using Shopify. I did some online tutorials and found Shopify quite user friendly.

At the start of lockdown, my fabulous business partner Brooke and I launched our online shop selling giftware, hair, skin, body and bath products to our customers. We have two options for pick up they can either click and collect from our salon, or if they live 5km within the salon we will deliver it straight to their door. Once the online shop was up, we put it on social media and then did an email blast to all our clients – it was quite a successful initiative.

Eventually lockdowns will finish and this uncertainty will inevitably come to an end, we’re going to be back working doing what we love very soon. You need to keep putting one foot in the other to keep positive for your team and clients.”

Check out Snip Into. 

Remember we’re all in this together, we keep our COVID-19 Resource Hub stocked with all the latest information for our clients. Check it out today! 

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