Know How Salons Print Money in India | Samir Srivastav, Looks Salon

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A salon is a treadmill from 7:30am to 10pm, 365 days a year

Samir Srivastav has run salon businesses for two decades, at Marico, Kaya, VLCC and Jean-Claude Biguine before becoming CEO of Looks Salon. Asked what surprises people most about the industry, that is his answer.

The first time Ragini met him, he was walking the floor of a Looks Salon asking guests if they needed anything. He knew their preferences, their children, their spouses. He turned to her husband in the next chair and said he’d want black coffee, correctly.

That is not charm for its own sake. Samir insists he is in hospitality rather than beauty, and everything he says about running the business follows from treating it that way, including the parts that are considerably less romantic than the shop floor suggests.

"It looks very fancy. It is an emotional roller coaster business."

Nobody at Looks is called operations

The people managing the floor are called service quality experts, not operations managers, and Samir is deliberate about it. The first person a customer sees when the door opens is that individual, before they ever reach the hairdresser, so the title should describe what the role protects.

It also signals something internally. Naming someone responsible for quality rather than coordination gives them permission to read the room and defend a standard. He teaches service, he says, because he cannot do it himself.

The economics nobody checks before signing a lease

The entry barrier looks low, which is why anyone can open a salon and many do. A Looks-standard salon of around 1,000 square feet with luxury interiors runs about ₹1.5 crore in fixed cost, before rent and operating expense.

Operating break-even, in his experience, comes at seven to eight months. Recovering the principal takes 18 to 24 months, and after that it is a home run, which is why he talks about patient capital. On the floor, the numbers he watches are footfall, around 7,800 a month being what the model needs, and repeat rate, where 35 to 40% is good news.

The thing that makes it achievable is that this is a hygiene business, not a luxury one. Hair grows. A 25 to 27 day cycle is a habit, not a discretionary purchase, so repeat customers are structurally available if you can reach them in time.

Where he will not open a salon

This is the most useful part of the conversation, because he is specific. No office complexes: Indians travel too far and work too long, and after work they want to go home, which is the same reason the gym in your office building goes unused.

No clubs or gymkhanas, because the members’ mentality is that everything inside should be cheap. Hotels only very selectively, and it must be a luxury property with 300 to 400 keys and steady non-resident traffic, not a business hotel, where guests won’t spend and leave in a hurry, and not a resort, where traffic is seasonal.

And, with apologies to mall operators, no malls. He has run successful mall salons and still believes a salon shouldn’t be in one. The economics are tough, the moment a mall opens a third salon nobody makes money, and the customer experience is wrong. Nobody wants to park, take two escalators and hunt for a washroom to get a blow dry.

Bombay is a neighbourhood business

What he wants instead is hyperlocal. Bombay’s traffic and travel times have pushed everything into the neighbourhood, and the salon needs to be somewhere you walk to in rubber chappals, get a blow dry, and walk back.

He contrasts that with north India, where dressing up to go to the salon is normal, and where a hotel location works because the customer is conscious of who she might run into. Looks is in 52 cities, around 40 of them in north India, which he notes means the rest of the country is badly underpenetrated. North India alone accounts for about 32% of Indian salon consumption.

The small-town growth comes through partners rather than franchisees, and often begins with a woman who visited a Looks in Delhi for a wedding and went home wanting one. He is careful about who gets a yes, because the brand is what customers see and the partner is who delivers it.

The workforce is the business, and the risk

A burger survives a change of staff. A haircut does not. Customers follow stylists between brands, which makes talent both the clearest differentiator and the deepest concentration risk, and Samir has watched businesses collapse when leadership or a team changed.

His answer is that you cannot contract your way out of it. Stylists stay when there is training, international standards and a visible future, and when the relationship goes past the professional. He knows most of his team by name, spends two of four weekends in salons, and is unambiguous about conduct: harassment of women colleagues, who make up 63% of the workforce, is where his tolerance ends.

He reads every Google review

Every morning, all of them, and he can recite the ratings of individual salons. He also teaches his teams how to read reviews, because you can tell from the language how much is organic and how much is planted.

On complaints, his position is that leaders take them, not managers. He describes one incident where a customer’s ear was nicked and the story went viral, and he cancelled a family holiday over New Year to deal with it, went to the man’s office and was made to wait three hours. An operations manager, he says, would not have the professional maturity to handle that, and a genuinely upset customer expects the highest authority to apologise.

Two things he will not sell you

Overselling is the industry’s reputation and he only half accepts it. A treatment genuinely needs home care; a colour or a blow dry does not, so nobody should be pushing product at you. He deliberately doesn’t reward staff on product sales, because 80% of the business is service and incentives distort behaviour.

The other is fairness. Asked which beauty trend he wishes would disappear, he doesn’t hesitate, and he says he turns away brands that come to him with whitening or brightening claims. De-tan is understandable. The rest, in his words, disrespects the person’s skin tone and origin, and he won’t stock it.

Listen to the full conversation with Samir Srivastav on FyndOutWithRagini.