The Business of Color

Every year for the past 29 years, SALON TODAY has asked its SALON TODAY 200 applicants to break down their gross sales by category, including cutting services, color services, chemical services, skin care/spa services, nail services, and retail. For decades, color and cutting services together represented the lion’s share of revenue, hovering around 30% each. But that’s changed in the past few years, with color services taking a very clear lead. 

Reporting for the calendar year 2025, this year’s SALON TODAY 200 applicants reported that color services represented 39% of their overall revenue, while cutting services remained at 30%. 

Even though hair color may represent the largest driver of your overall sales, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s driving your business’s profitability. If a salon doesn’t raise its prices as the inventory costs increase or if pricing doesn’t factor in all the costs involved, a color service could be costing you money. And, if your team members don’t use their consultation time wisely to recommend treatments, add-on services, and home-care products, you are missing valuable sales.  

Most owners agree that a thorough consultation is key to a loyalty-building, profit-driving color service.  

The Art of the Color Consultation

When it comes to consultations, there’s a difference between perception and reality. 

“Aveda did an interesting study about salon consultations,” says Virginia Meyer, co-owner of Fourteen Jay in New York and the Dean of the Aveda Business College. “First, they asked stylists if they felt they gave their clients fantastic consultations, and 91% responded that they did. But, when they asked guests if they felt they received a great consultation at their salon, only 9% responded that they did.”

Meyer doesn’t think those differing perceptions happen because stylists don’t understand how important a consultation is or even that they aren’t doing them. Still, there is definitely a difference between what a stylist feels is a great consultation and how the guest values it. 

Meet Virginia! Learn more about Meyer professionally and personally in "Profiles in Leadership: Virginia Meyer's Rise Through the Ranks."

Even Fourteen Jay's website encourages prospective clients to think about hair color services differently. The tagline of the homepage reads, "Beautiful Color Begins with Healthy Hair."

“Delivering a thorough consultation starts with how we as owners train it, and how we continue to reinforce what great consultation behavior looks like,” says Meyer. “Because of the time limits of a client appointment, there’s a tendency for stylists and colorists to make the consultation quick and almost transactional, and that is exactly what we DON’T want it to be. We need to make sure our service providers not only meet the guests’ expectations but exceed them.” 

Perfecting the Consultation for New Clients

The foundation of a thorough consultation can start before the client even walks through your door. 

“We have really solid systems regarding delivering a consultation, and it starts when clients book online,” said Amber O’Hara, owner of Golden & Braid Salons in Orange County, California. “When a new client books a color service, they get an automated color intake form where we ask them when they last colored their hair, if they’ve had box dye in the last six months, and whether they want to go lighter, darker, cooler, or warmer. Our employee-based team reviews the form before the appointment, and the front desk will reach out based on any needs that the colorist has.”

For example, if the client reports she’s had box dye and wants to go lighter, that’s typically a color correction service, so Golden Braid’s front desk will reach out and ask the prospective client for a minimum of three current hair photos and three inspiration hair photos. The team then ensures the result is achievable and books the appointment accordingly. 

At Fourteen Jay, Meyer and her co-owner David Adams, insist that every new color client has a separate color consultation, either in person or via Zoom. “Owners and stylists worry that this will turn new guests away, but that’s just not the case,” she says. “Guests love a separate consultation, and once there’s a plan in place, they are willing to wait for that color service. Our color department is really busy and booked out a few weeks, but if we have a new colorist on the floor, we sometimes will book them with a 30-minute consultation before, then schedule a color appointment right after that for the guest.”

Meyer says the salon also charges the new guest $25 for the consultation, and that fee is applied to the cost of their first color service.

Learn more about offering virtual consulations. 

Own Your Professionalism

Meyer concedes that the Information Age and social media hasn’t made a colorist’s job any easier. “We’ve created a little bit of a monster, because there’s so much information available to guests out there, they’ve become their own colorists,” Meyer says. “They’re asking for color services they’ve seen online before we have a chance to take a moment to assess where they are at and where they really want to go with their hair. In general, as an industry, we give our professional authority away all the time. Remember, what the guest really wants is for their colorist to take charge, offer them professional advice, and lead the service.” 

Meyer says when you think about performing a color service the questions you ask yourself shouldn’t be, “How fast can I go?” and  “How much can I charge? Rather, you should be asking yourself, “How much value can I add? And “When I listen to this guest, and I hear her tell me what she’s looking for, what mechanism do I have in place to ensure that my version of what she’s looking for matches hers.” 

Setting Realistic Expectations

Both Meyer and O’Hara empower their colorists to turn a guest away if the requested result is unachievable or compromises the guest's hair. If a client’s desired outcome is going to take more than one service (often when the client wants to go from dark to light or if it’s really a color correction service), then part of the consultation means coming up with a game plan and making sure the client understands each required service, how much time it will take and what each service will cost. 

O’Hara says success behind the chair boils down to better communication between the colorist and the client, helping the client feel confident in the process and agreeing together on realistic expectations. To help her colorists do this, shortly after Covid, she took their paper consultation forms and set up a digital one she set up digital one.

Amber O'Hara makes her digital color consultation form available for owners to download at houseofcollaboration.com

“The form includes maybe 10 questions, and it helps the colorist make sure they cover everything. On it, they record hair density, previous damage, how long it’s been since the client colored their hair, what their hair goals are, and how many sessions it will take to get the client there,” she says. “Then we have our services listed on the bottom with the prices connected. The colorist also fills out the recommended maintenance to keep the desired result over time and the recommended take-home products. Once the colorist has completed the form, she reviews it with the client. If the client agrees to the day’s service, we ask her to sign it.” 

Is Your Price Right? Learn more about strategically pricing your services for profit. 

“We use Vagaro and one thing we love about it is if a new guest books a color service online, it’ll automatically recommend a suggested add-on service like a toner or a treatment,” she says. “Our number one add-on service suggested by Vagaro that gets booked is our deep conditioning treatment.”

Fourteen Jay's Color Service Wheel 

Meyer has a similar approach for getting to the heart of delivering a color service that matches client expectations and the salon has even developed a color service consultation wheel around it:

• Start with asking really great, open-ended questions about what the guest wants to achieve. 
• Don’t just rely on your ears to confirm what you’ve heard. Use visuals in the form of hair color images (not a swatch book.) “For example, the client may come in saying she wants to be a strawberry blonde, with some balayage in the front,” she says. “But what does that really mean? Balayage is a technique, and it’s up to us to determine the appropriate technique. And, how you interpret Strawberry Blonde could be different than how your client does.”
• Once you confirm that you understand the client’s desired outcome, then give her customized options. “There’s usually more than one way to get to a guest’s desired outcome, and you need to make sure your guest is not only aware of the options, but how much time it will take to get there and what it will cost to achieve each option.” 
• Discuss and offer any treatments that will help prepare the hair and the scalp, and give the client the best color result. “When you’re talking about their desired color outcome, you should naturally be talking about the health of the hair and the scalp. Set a little course for that by saying, ‘Beautiful color starts with healthy hair.’” 
• Talk about the right home-care products to protect their color investment. 

O’Hara agrees that giving clients color options at different price points is key. “Not everybody’s budget is the same. My best friend may make the same amount as I do, but she values things differently. Where I may be fine spending $300 on a color service every six weeks, she may want to spend her beauty budget on microdermabrasion,” she says. “Even our service menu is designed with a minimum of three options. For example, for blonding, we have partial highlights, deluxe highlights, full blonding, complex balayage services, and reverse balayage.”

Keeping a Loyal Client Engaged with Color

Too often stylists greet their longtime guests warmly, then rush to the back to mix ‘their formula.’ But is a colorist doing them a disservice by not offering a loyal guest the same variety of options as they would a new guest? 

“We are creatures of habit, right?” Meyers says. “Same as last time is often guest-driven, and that’s OK, but it’s still our responsibility to offer them options for change. We try to establish a guideline that at least once a season, so four times a year, the colorist comes to the guest with a new idea about what could be done.”

Meyer offers this as an example, “You might not be ready for a change, and that’s totally OK, but I’ve been thinking about the color journey we’ve been on together. As winter turns to spring, it’s a great time to think about a refresh, to lighten up, and this is what I was thinking about for your hair.”

She says the client may not be ready to jump at the change, but the idea might spark. “I’d say nine times out of 10, the guest at her following appointment will be ready for the change you are offering,” she says. “Guests get bored when you get bored, so it’s our job to not get boring. Sometimes, guests are ready for change, but they love their service providers and are a little reticent to ask for it. This is your chance to step into your professional authority.” 

O’Hara opened her salons after teaching balayage and says offering change comes naturally to her. “I always coach my team on having a plan for the next appointment and telling the guest what you are thinking. That could be adding some balayage pieces around the front to brighten a client up as you head into summer, or adding some depth back in the hair to create some dimension as you head into fall.” 

Consultation Training: The Value of Photo Journaling

Meyer has an important message for salon owners as well: “If you really want to think about the quality of the consultations that are happening in your salon, get out on the floor, watch and listen to what’s really happening.” 

Bright Idea! Make photo journaling an assignment at your next team meeting. 

To help colorists strengthen their consultation skills, Meyer recommends giving themselves “the beautiful opportunity to photo journal yourself in a consultation,” she says. “It’s a brilliant activity where somebody plays the colorist, somebody plays the guest, and somebody plays the observer.”

The observer videotapes the consultation with the colorist’s phone, so she can review herself in action.  “Often, what we think is happening in our head is a little bit different than what is actually happening,” Meyer says. Look at how your body is positioned—we coach that you should sit down for the consultation with a client and it be eye to eye. Are you asking the right questions? Are you using visual tools? Are you clearly hearing what the guest is saying and are you confirming that you understood correctly.” 

Inventory Control and Color Pricing

One year after the launch of Shampoo Society Salon & Wellness in Whitby, Ontario, Owners Bailey Neto and Sophie Brindamour knew they needed help with their color inventory. 

“Hair color is expensive, and we quickly realized we needed help tracking our color,” Brindamour says. “I like to dive into the numbers, and it didn’t take long for us to realize our color orders weren’t matching up with what we were using for services. We’d run out of a shade but didn’t have the cash flow to order more inventory. We knew something needed to change, and we didn’t want to have to adjust the team’s commissions.”

Around that time, the new entrepreneurs were on Instagram and came across a post about SalonScale, a color management app that helps salons track formulas, understand their real-time color costs, reduce excess product waste and manage inventory. 

Learn more about how SalonScale was developed. 

“We thought this is a no-brainer, let’s give it a whirl,” Neto says. 

In May 2025, they brought in SalonScale after a few training sessions on Zoom and watching a few online tutorials. “It is really user friendly, you just click and go,” Brindamour says. The system allows stylists to save and reuse their formulas for each guest, ensuring perfect results each time. By weighing the waste after a service, SalonScale helps them refine their formulas to prevent overmixing in the future. 

As a result, the system helps management improve backbar efficiency and profitability and gives owners confidence that excess color isn’t washed down the drain and add-on color service don’t walk out the door unpaid for. 

“Our team was already pretty conscious of adding on extra color onto the bill if a color service warranted it, but it was random, and they were guessing what it would cost,” Neto says. 

With SalonScale, Shampoo Society was able to switch to a Parts & Labor pricing structure. Labor captures the time a colorist spends on the service, while Parts breaks out the specific cost of the color needed to perform the service. 

The owners say it was a bit of an adjustment for the team, but once they saw the benefits of tracking formulas and understanding exactly how much formula to mix, they quickly got on board. “Now, it’s just a smooth part of doing business,” Neto says. 

The owners were also transparent on social media about using SalonScale. “We love that our pricing is transparent to customers. When we launched SalonScale, we gave the team a trial month to get used to it, then switched to Parts & Labor pricing in June. We gave the team the information they needed to communicate the change to their clients, but we also encouraged them to put that back in the salon. Most clients quickly understood that they were paying separately for the color that was used on them,” Neto says. 

The salon quickly realized other benefits to using SalonScale. If a stylist was on vacation or leave, another team member could easily step in and handle a color service for their client because the precise formula was tracked in the system. Stylists began building a historical record of formulas used on a client so they could look back on what they did in months’ past. And, hair color services and charges are seamlessly reported to the front desk so the client is charged accurately at checkout. 

Not only did the new pricing help the salon cover color inventory costs, but the salon started making more profits on each color service. 

“We were able to take those profits and invest in more retail because we didn’t have any when we first opened. And, we’ve added two more stations and two mirrors. We also moved our color inventory twice and extended our color bar,” Neto says. 

Improving the Process of Mixing Color

It was after the pandemic started that Darren Wood, co-owner of Ensemble Salon in Oregon City, Oregon, and 22 Changes Salon and Spa in Vancouver, Washington, leaned into sustainability in a major way. With his business partners Erin Kramer and Regina Davidson, and their team of 50 stylists 100% behind the move, he began investigating what was possible in his two locations. Major renovations were out of the question as it was for many salon owners during the shut downs. He hadn’t even been able to upgrade either of the water heating systems despite regularly running out of hot water on busy days.

Introducing recycling and bringing in Vish color management technology were easy first steps. Launching a green fee of $6.25, paid by the client, recovered recycling costs, while Vish quickly slashed his color inventory bill. Next Wood found ECOHEADS. The water saved by the filtered showerheads not only slashed his energy and water bills, but instantly solved the dilemma of hot water running out. The question then was “What next?”

“I came across Sustain Beauty Co at a L’Oréal event and at first I was pretty skeptical, but everything they claim so far has turned out to be better than the promise,” he says.

Sustain Beauty Co is a supplier of ECOHEADS but Darren hadn’t really clocked that when they bought the showerheads. Only when he was at the event with his salon director, Kelleigh Strange, and he saw the SBCo stand, did he realize. Meanwhile, Kelleigh had spotted the Ping X color mixer on the stand and pounced. The Ping X is an automated color mixer designed by ECOHEADS with the dual intention of mixing color to its maximum volume and containing fumes to protect stylist health.

“I thought, it looks cute but aren’t stylists just being lazy not mixing by hand?” he says. “However, Kelleigh was adamant we needed them so we bought one and took it back to the salon.”

The first time mixing lightener with the Ping X, with the team watching, there was an immediate uproar. The team couldn’t believe the difference. Within a few days, Wood had to contact SBCo to buy more for each salon.

“I suddenly realized that when new colors are developed they are mixed in a lab. You simply can’t replicate that by hand mixing in a salon, and the difference is enormous,” he says. “We use Vish with every client formula optimized so there is no surplus. Yet we witnessed an immediate drop of between 20 and 25 per cent in color used when mixed in the Ping. The resulting formula is fluffy with much more volume so it goes further and it glides on the hair. All the stylists had to reset their formulas, and now the team races for the mixer whenever there is a color client.”

It’s the salon associates who use the mixers the most as they support the colorists with mixing formulas, but when the associate is busy or absent, the stylist must do it themselves and it takes time they don’t have. Using the Ping X gives them back valuable time; they can measure their formula using the Ping bowl on the Vish scale then set it to mix while they do the rest of the service prep with their client.

Learn more about Ping X!

Wood describes working with Sustain Beauty Co as a breath of fresh air, but it’s his salon and his team that are working towards fresher, cleaner air by embracing more sustainable options. That it has impacted positively on the business’s bottom line is just the icing on the cake.