Can Your Salon Pass?

 by John P. Ribner

When it comes to cleaning your salon, does “out of sight” mean “out of mind?” It shouldn’t, because what you can’t see can hurt you!

Salon pros should ask themselves whether their facility could pass the “white glove test.” This phrase refers to checking the cleanliness of a certain area by putting on a white glove and running a finger over every nook and cranny of the place – if the glove gets dirty, the area isn’t clean. In realistic terms, it simply means ridding those “out-of-sight” and hard-to-reach areas of the dust, dirt, lint and hair they can quickly collect.

For Marie Atchley’s Sundial Tanning Centre in Flint, MI, it all started with a new client. “She told me she had been tanning at another salon; but she didn’t want to tan there anymore,” Marie explained. “Apparently, she dropped her bottle of lotion behind a sunbed and when she retrieved it, the bottle was covered with dust, hair and lint. It really grossed her out.” The incident was enough to cause the tanner to take her business elsewhere. It was also enough to make Marie think. “I gained a client because a competitor’s salon wasn’t clean; but I could just as easily lose a client if my store is dirty,” she commented. 

“Many dirty places in a salon are out of sight, so people forget to clean them,” Marie said. “Even though most clients won’t ever come in contact with these areas, it’s still very important to keep them clean; you just never know what might happen.”

Some of the hard-to-reach areas on Marie’s cleaning list are the tops of the doorframes, tops of the walls, in corners and behind the equipment, legs and frames of the tanning units, and under the chairs. “We’ve found stickers on the bottoms of sunbeds, gum stuck to the bottoms of the chairs and disposable eyewear stuck behind mirrors. They’ve even stuffed these things inside some of our stand-up booths, and that’s never easy to remove!” But remove them she does, because Marie doesn’t want to risk losing clients over cleanliness issues.

Many salon pros are quick to say they keep their salons clean; but what’s their definition of clean? If it’s just wiping down the equipment between tanners and occasionally sweeping the floor and taking out the trash, then the salon really isn’t clean at all. If there’s dust, dirt and other debris hiding around every corner, then it’s just begging to be discovered by discriminating tanners, and no salon pro wants that to happen.

Perhaps it’s time you got yourself a white glove…?