Hair Removal Survey

We asked over 100 of you with paying clients about hair removal - the main treatments, your client's views and what new skills you wanted to develop in this ‘bread and butter' treatment for many therapists. We also asked how suppliers could improve their main products for your clients.

Here is what we found about the main treatments:

- Top of the list for popularity - waxing by a long way. Followed by threading, electrolysis, laser and sugaring - in that order.

- Most of you use waxing on your clients and yourself - the same is true for threading where you know how to do it!

- So the key question - what is most important for your client in their decision?

The top 3 important factors for the client are...

• ‘It lasts a long time'
• ‘Reduces re-growth'
• ‘My therapist recommendation'

All these were more important than cost and how quick the treatment is

So what about the clients?

You told us about client satisfaction and which treatment gave you best client repeat visits.

We hear a lot about customer satisfaction levels from Colleges to hotels, so here are the top performers on client satisfaction levels for hair removal:

% rating as excellent and very good 

• Waxing  75% 
• Threading  72% 
• Laser  64%

Whilst none of the main treatments rated poorly some just achieved a higher degree of satisfaction

Repeat visits are crucial to the success of any therapist and spa and beauty operators so we asked you to rate the main treatments that give you the best client repeat visits:

Best repeat visits are from waxing and threading.  Over 80% of you agreed that waxing gave the most repeat visits and an impressive 62% of you agreed that threading also gives good repeat visits. Electrolysis and sugaring come next.  Finally, laser comes further down the list probably due to the higher cost to the client.

Training

A huge 68% of you expressed an interest in gaining further skills in hair removal to be able to offer a range of options to your clients. Laser, waxing and threading were the main area you want to learn but all treatments had some level of interest.
In fact 50% of you were interested in training in laser treatments.

What you want from hair removal suppliers

Our findings show, unsurprisingly, that what you want from suppliers depends on the type of treatment you use. Here are the main improvements that most of you agreed on:

• Waxing - more aftercare products
• Laser, threading and sugaring - more training on how to use
• For both laser and electrolysis - less cost for client

50% of you offered aftercare products to your clients, this is mainly led by waxing treatments where you clearly said that you wanted more aftercare products to offer your clients.

So our advice to you at 

- Make sure you have a range of waxing hair removal treatments to offer from regular body hair removal to intimate waxing such as Brazilian. But, ensure you are well trained and don't just be tempted to ‘give it a go' - your clients will simply switch their loyal business to a proficiently trained therapist.