Opening a "skin management" beauty salon is really not as simple as imagined

Xiao Yang, a post-95 entrepreneur, is an actor, because the performance requires heavy makeup, Xiao Yang often has to suffer from "bad face" such as poor skin quality, clogged pores, love acne and sensitive skin. After visiting a number of "skin management centers" and experiencing various beauty and skin care services, Xiao Yang realized that most of these institutions in the market "treat the symptoms but not the root causes", so he and three friends began to start a business, and Xiao Yang was responsible for managing various affairs in the store on a daily basis.

This institution specializing in facials and body conditioning was established this year. Selection, site selection, research, decoration, preparation for nearly a year, Xiao Yang and three friends have invested about 2 million yuan. Xiao Yang introduced that the store is still in a state of loss, and it is expected to take a year to return the capital.

Obviously, the lifestyle beauty market has become the Red Sea.

Compared with "medical beauty", they mainly use non-medical means to provide consumers with non-invasive and non-invasive skin care, body contouring, SPA, makeup modification and other services. All kinds of skin management centers on the market are actually a combination of a variety of life beauty formats.

As a segment of the beauty market, due to the relatively low risk, low starting cost, and high acceptance of beauty lovers, the market will develop rapidly, and it is expected that the market size will reach 161 million yuan by 2023.

With the rising demand for "becoming beautiful", the skin management center is becoming more and more popular in life beauty institutions with less risk and more frequent consumption. However, under the hot market, the competition is becoming more and more fierce, which seems to be a lower threshold, but in fact, it is a comprehensive test of the operator's all-round ability.

"Beauty" is the business of young women, and the 2021 China Life Beauty Market Analysis Report shows that the current medical beauty consumer population in China is mainly concentrated in young women aged 20-30. In 2018, the proportion of consumers aged 20-25 in China's medical aesthetic market reached 40.4%; the proportion of consumers aged 26-30 reached 23.3%.

The low unit price and low risk of life beauty are naturally loved by young students and office workers, and the main consumers in its stores are young women under the age of 35, mainly including students, white-collar workers, teachers and so on. Entrepreneurs are mainly beauticians who jump ship from beauty institutions, and there is no shortage of cross-border entrants in the industry.

Xiao Yang does not want to just catch up with the trend, but also hopes to seriously do a life beauty institution to help more people solve skin problems by opening a store. Therefore, she and her friends spent a year preparing, mainly for site selection, market research, product selection and business design.

In the preliminary preparation, the selection of products takes the most time and effort. Xiao Yang believes that product quality determines the use effect of consumers, which in turn affects word of mouth, so there must be sufficient investment in the selection of products.

Her selection steps are clear:

First of all, a basic understanding of the various types of products, followed by a field trip to the manufacturer;

Subsequently, she bought back the products she was satisfied with and tried them one by one with her family and friends;

In the end, we chose a product that everyone has a good feedback on.

But what is worse is that the products on the market are mixed, and Xiao Yang has experienced a "bad face" many times during the trial.

In terms of site selection, large passenger flow and reasonable rent are the main considerations.

Xiao Yang also spent a lot of effort in market research, in addition to visiting dozens of life beauty institutions in Shenzhen, she also specially handled recharge cards in three or four skin management centers, deeply experienced the products and services of several institutions, and thus summarized the selection logic and business design ideas.

There are chain stores and single stores in the market.

Xiao Yang is still a single store, but after the breakeven of the store, she will consider opening a second store, and it must be a direct store. "At present, most of the chain stores in the market are franchise models, which are low-cost, but it is difficult to control service and product quality. I want to take the power to run the store in my own hands. ”

The initial investment of 2 million yuan is expected to return the cost in one year - it can be seen that the "skin management center" opened by Xiao Yang is not small, and the speed of payment collection is slow.

From the cost point of view, pre-renovation, market research and equipment purchase are one-time expenses, while rent, goods, marketing, and personnel costs are fixed expenses.

In the fixed expenditure, the cost of goods is not low, according to Xiao Yang, the store mainly provides skin care and body conditioning, and most of the products used are imported. Among them, skin care is specifically refined into three categories: small bubbles, needle-free water light, and functional conditioning, and these three categories will be divided into mid-end and high-end, and the pricing of the two will be different. Body conditioning, mainly based on aromatherapy oil massage.

Because most of the products are imported, Xiao Yang not only needs to refer to market pricing when pricing, but also considers the overall commodity and store operating costs. Therefore, compared with other institutions, the price of Xiao Yang's services is high, for example, the price of small bubbles on the market is mostly about 100 yuan, but its high-end small bubble prices reach 268 yuan / time.

In terms of marketing costs, Xiao Yang's marketing costs mainly come from Dianping, because it is necessary to pay management fees to the platform regularly. But for her, the conversion efficiency of platform drainage is far less efficient than that of "old with new", which makes Xiao Yang realize the importance of "word of mouth" and take it as the core of store operation. "Many customers have a good experience after coming and are willing to recommend our shop to family and friends. Some old customers will apply for membership cards, stored value cards, so as to become our long-term customers. ”

Personnel costs are also the main expenses. According to Xiao Yang, there are currently 5 employees in the store, including a store manager and four beauticians. Among them, the store manager needs to have the ability to sell and manage the store, while the beautician requires his professional technique and must pass the professional qualification examination for the beautician. Xiao Yang said that at present, there is a shortage of beauticians with qualification certificates in the market. At present, although there are only 5 employees in the store, the flow of customers is not enough, making it difficult for the store to cover the expenditure in the short term, and making the "personnel cost" the most expensive item in the daily expenses of the store, in addition to rent.

At present, 2-3 people are received every day on weekdays and 6-8 people per day on weekends. In terms of various businesses, "needle-free water light" is a blockbuster product, accounting for 40% of the overall revenue, followed by small bubble projects and essential oil massage projects, accounting for 15% each.

In the entire medical beauty industry, "explosive products" are the key to rapidly educating the market and attracting customer growth, and life beauty institutions are no exception. Almost every lifestyle beauty institution has a blockbuster product that merchants use to attract customers, guide more consumption, and create store reputation. The product may be less expensive, more recognizable, or very well-served and word-of-mouth.

The entry threshold of the life beauty industry is not high, but the difficulty of operation is not small. The products and business models of the Skin Management Center are easily copied, and if you want to operate for a long time, you will face many problems.

The first is the problem of vicious competition, in order to obtain customers, attract customers, various merchants will compete to reduce prices, product prices are too low will lead to some merchants have no money to earn.

Initially, merchants lowered prices because they wanted to attract customers at more affordable prices. However, various merchants began to carry out round after round of price reduction for the purpose of "price lower than others", which obviously became a vicious circle, and the merchants who originally had higher operating costs and did not want to participate in the "price reduction" could not bear the pressure of customer acquisition and began to reduce prices.

Endless price cuts have put pressure on newcomers like Xiao Yang who want to be high-end: store operating costs are higher, and if the price of products is lowered, it may reduce revenue, making it worse for stores that continue to lose money.

"Now the merchants are desperately reducing prices, the profits are very thin, and then the merchants themselves need subsidies, the quality of products and services will decline, because there is no way, so that the consumer is a bad experience, bad service, bad products, in fact, this is a very vicious circle."

The quality of upstream products is uneven, which also makes the process of preparation and selection more bumpy. Xiao Yang found in the product survey that although some upstream suppliers of light medical beauty are famous, the product quality is not up to standard. For example, when she was researching essential oil products, she found that a company with a good reputation was actually just a small workshop, and even the disinfection process was lacking. It takes a lot of time to select a good product, which is one of the important reasons why it has been preparing for the opening of its store for up to a year.

In addition, the physical store decoration period is long, and the difficulty of recovering funds has worried her for a while; the small number of qualified beauticians in the market has also increased her recruitment difficulty.

It is human nature to love beauty, and "life beauty" is the need of people, but this does not mean that everyone can succeed in this industry. To do long-term business in the field of life beauty, it is not only necessary to resist the risks brought about by the chaos of the industry, but also to create a healthy business model on the basis of ensuring products and services.