There’s nothing quite like a crisis to spur marketing creativity, and this year STAMP 2020 gave applicants an outlet to share the ingenuity through new COVID-19 categories that revolved around marketing products and gift cards and communicating with clients through the salon shutdown period. Here's Karen Allen Salon + Spa's creative COVID-19 client communication campaign. 

The New Normal In Caring for You
Karen Allen Salon + Spa
Riverside and Temecula, CA
Owner: Khanh Nguyen

When it came to communicating to guests during the shutdown and right before reopening, Karen Allen Salon and Spa turned to Justin Phu Media, who has helped the salon with its PR for the past three years. Leveraging Facebook, Instagram and email, the salon promoted online retail sales through Aveda and sold curbside retail and home-color kits. “The $10,000 in sales this netted during our closure was a big help with the PPE we needed to purchase,” says Khanh Nguyen. 

As the salon prepared for its reopening, the team created a video that showed guests all the new precautions that were being taken to keep them safe, as well as what the new procedures for a service would look like for the guest. 

“The video went viral and we had an overwhelmingly positive feedback from our guests, and gained about 10 percent new guests during those first few weeks of reopening,” Nguyen says. “We saw a great return in our investment as our reopening was as smooth as we hoped for—our sales for the first three weeks of reopening increased 20 percent over last year, although we could only operate at 50 percent capacity.”