Week 2

This week, after having finalized our plan for the storefront, we began thinking of the financial side of both opening and running it. It was difficult to come up with a list of all of the things we would require to get us to opening day. Things like a reception desk, licensed beauticians on payroll, permits, shampoo, hair drying chairs, and many others. Then we had to research each of these to find out how much each would cost. One of the lucky breaks we had was that a woman was selling all of her salon supplies on Ebay, for pretty cheap. We made a list of everything she was offering and the total price, and it was hugely helpful. After this we had to make projections about the cost of running the salon for a year. For me this meant choosing all of the services we would be providing, and deciding the price of each. We decided that we wanted to distinguish our salon from others in another way (other than allowing students to work in it): we will provide services to people of all ethnicities. When you pass by a hair salon, it is usually geared toward one ethnicity. We want to expand this and have our salon cater to not only people with white women, but also black and hispanic ones. The products and services are different for the different ethnicities, so we will need to account for that. We would also like to make sure that the people we hire are well versed in handling more than one type of hair.

A big part of what I did this week was working on a 3D model of the storefront. On Wednesday, I went with my project manager to do a few more measurements of the space, and then this weekend I finalized the model. It took me quite some time to get it right, but I finished the entire front room of the store. My group has decided that we do not want to use the back rooms until our business is off the ground. We will be using the other rooms as storage and office space to begin with. If we do well in our first year, we want to expand the business to include a nail salon in the large room directly through the back left door of the main room. We may also include either a waxing or massage station in the closed off room (located in the protruding area in the center of the back wall of the main room). I think all of these plans are good ones, but they will take a lot of work in those back rooms, and I think it is better for us to focus on doing one thing really well, before we expand the services we offer.
Below are screen shots of the 3D model.

Thanks for reading,

Zank