Decadent Doesn’t Make You Ignorant: Going Green
June 30th, 2009
Just because you’re decadent, doesn’t mean you have to live ignorant. You can pamper yourself and your clients, yet still be smart about it. More luxury beauty salons and cosmetology schools are going green, figuring out how to reduce their waste levels, present products with lighter levels of packaging, and even offer benefits to clients who help out in the process.
Denise Wall, the merchandising manager and brand buyer at upscale Kansas City salon and spa Bijin, says she remembers the day she and the owners made their decision to Go Green. “We sat down with a budget, a list of potential action items and just brainstormed for a couple of hours one weekend,” she says. “It was all about recognizing habits as just that; a habit. If common sense wasn’t involved, we dropped the habit and re-engineered a way to make it more beneficial for our business and our customers.”
The first steps were easy. Bijin Salon called a biz-to-biz recycling service that contracted to transport and re-use all of their paper and plastic waste, cans, shipping boxes and packaging used in sales and services. Later that week, Denise bought clean packaged, energy-saving light bulbs to integrate as each old bulb in the salon burned out. These two steps may seem like costs, but they actually paid for themselves after only a few months of use. This is something that any cosmetology school going green can do quickly, easily and affordably.
The next three steps Denise and the owners took were costs to the project, but aided them in designing a newer, more natural look for the beauty salon. They switched to using 100% recyclable paper and plastic bags for all their client’s retail purchases. They also designed a no-waste gift card system from recycled plastics that allow the cards to be reused when the client redeems them.
The last step was one of the most enjoyable for Denise. She set out to find a local or regional environmentally-conscious beauty products manufacturer for their salon product line. After a few field trips and phone calls, she settled on a wonderful local manufacturer named Indigo Wild, who create the popular Zum line of hygiene and hair care products. Bijin now gets the satisfaction of knowing their products are transported to them from mere miles, rather than hundreds of miles. They keep pollution and fuel use to a minimum, and have also created a nice local feedback loop of profit and wage earning.
What is your beauty salon or cosmetology school doing to go green? What are your ideas for creating a more environmentally-friendly salon experience for your future customers? You might be surprised at how easy and cost-effective it is to Go Green. Let us know how you do it!






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