To the anticipation and excitement of salon and spa owners around the country, we notified applicants of their status in our 2015 Salon Today 200 competition on December 1. Each applicant was notified by email whether or not they made this year’s list, but the honorees were not notified about the categories in which they received honors.

The Salon Today 200 competition which recognizes growth and best business practices in 11 different competition categories allows applicants to enter one or as many categories as they choose, and they can be honored in multiple categories. The competition was launched 18 years ago to encourage salon owners to share success stories and best business practices with one another and to gather salon data that would begin establishing business benchmarks that all salons and spas could measure themselves against.

In a holiday-themed “12 Days of the Salon Today 200,” we started announcing the names of the honorees in each category with a series of eblasts starting on Monday, December 8, starting with growth-and dividing that category over two days, then working through each of the best business practices.

But we’ve found that our ST200 friends didn’t wait until the category announcements to start celebrating. Within minutes of the being notified last week, they started leveraging social media to celebrate their win with their staff, their clients and their salon owner peers and their local communities.

The first post we caught was from Rowena Yeager, owner of Studio Wish Salon Spa in Twinsburg, Ohio. She cleverly took a picture of her award wall in her salon, her row of past ST200 awards and the space where the new one would go:

Jaison Henry, owner of J.Henry Salon in Portland, Maine, used some elegant graphics to announce his first ST200 win:

With a little help from her friend Elf on a Shelf, Paola Hinton, owner of Five Senses Salon and Spa in Peoria, Illinois, made the announcement with her window:

Sharing an intriguing quote from Serious Business, Gayle Fulbright, owner of Headlines The Salon in Encinitas, California, asks owners, “What do you do when you win the Salon Today 200?”:

In Flossmoor Illinois, Larry Kane, owner of Jonathan Kane Salon and Spa decided the honor was worth celebrating with a Saturday staff lunch:

In Austin, Roy Fredericks owner of Avant Salon Spa, dug up some old Salon Today 200 covers to help celebrate his honor with his community:

Tiffany Conway, owner of Coco Cheveux in South Portland, Oregon, used a portion of the actual announcement email with images of her team to get the celebration started.

And, perhaps our favorite, staff surprise. After finding out about her honor, Tamra Fiedler Segret kept the news secret for a day, then asked her staff at Studio 700 Salon and Spa in Corona, California, to line up, giving each one an envelope to open with a word inside. When opened, each team member read their word, together announcing that they’d made it into the Salon Today 200: