In her third column for Creative HEAD, Vanessa Koeb explains why a conscious price raise can still get clients in the door
To combat the cost of living crisis and declining interest from clients I provided “rescue offers”, which I talked about in my last column, as a solution to save my monthly income as times got tougher. But I had to raise my prices too, like everyone else.
I raised my prices primarily because the tax percentage went up by at least 2 per cent, and coupled with the rising of the general costs of the products I was using, I simply had to do something.
I call my price rise “conscious” because I still wanted my services to be accessible to my clientele. I discussed it all in a coaching session with stylist and business coach Jo Irving. Then, I sat down with my accountant and properly broke down every service cost from product usage, rent, to tax, to understand how much I was actually earning and if that was sustainable with my lifestyle.
I then decided to go for a conscious price raise, choosing only the popular services like cuts and blow-drys, half head of foils, and toners. However, I left bigger services still accessible to everybody.
Putting prices up consciously only on popular services hasn’t been as dramatic as I thought it was going to be. It kept my schedule busy but mostly it massively helped me overcome the general rise in costs.
We all know that the country is battling a tough economic climate, and it’s affecting all of us. While this has affected my bookings, as I discussed in my last article, it fired me up to develop a solution to lift up my business and keep my clients coming back. So far so good!
Vanessa is a freelance stylist at The Hair Salon in Hove
