Make Your Small Salon Space Matter

Small Salon Tips to Maximize Your Space

Opt for Light & Airy Design to Make Things Feel Bigger

Unless your brand is explicitly dark and moody, try for an airy and light design vibe when working with a smaller salon space. Small spaces tend to feel even smaller when you introduce dark colors, curtains, and closed-off sections. Keep things bright, light, and open to really maximize the space you’re working with.

Make Sure Your Workflow is Functional First—Then Work on the Esthetics

Sure, the way your salon looks is really important—especially because it directly impacts how your customers feel about your shop as well as your how effective your unique branding is.

That being said, when you’re designing your small salon, you need to put workflow first.

Move the look and décor to second place, because you need to plan around your functional flow first things first.

Before you start planning how you’ll transform your tiny salon space, try to talk through an entire day of services. Do your best to lay out what you’ll need, how you’ll do things, and what the day-to-day activities look like.

Then, plan around that—you can work the cute décor in after this, trust us.

Implement Multi-Purpose Stations

Try to think about how every piece of your salon could meet multiple needs. Can you have a workspace that doubles as storage for your back bar? Can your shampoo station convert into your bro waxing station?

It might sound kind of silly at first but optimizing your stations to do multiple jobs and work in different ways can really help make your space feel less cramped and cluttered.

Plus, you’ll love the added convenience.

Odds are, you’ll need to get creative. But the good news is that there are plenty of inspo ideas on Pinterest to lead this charge, so even if creativity isn’t your strongest suit, there’s a lot of inspiration to get you started.

Think Vertically

Products, tools, back bar supplies, equipment—finding storage for all of these very necessary things can be a challenge in a small space.

While we won’t try to lay out your storage system for you, we will offer one piece of helpful advice—think vertical. Instead of piling things horizontally and taking up lots of floor space, minimize your footprint and work your way up with shelves, cabinets, and storage spaces.

This will leave you with plenty of square footage on the ground to play with and lots of beautiful organization taking up the walls.

Invest in the Right Equipment

Think about it this way—you don’t have mega square footage to consider for your salon, right? This can kind of be a blessing when it comes to equipment.

Instead of spending your budget trying to fill the space in your shop, you can focus that money on the key equipment you need to make that space as functional as possible.

All that to say, you can invest in the right equipment instead of focusing on all the empty space you need to fill with things that might not be as important.

Lots of Natural Lighting

Fight the cave feeling with lots of natural light. Keep windows open without blinds, avoid decorative curtains, and try your best to not block out the natural light with any of your equipment if you can.

Open Concept Floor Plans

Walls and sections can make a small space feel even smaller. Resist the urge to section off areas, put up privacy curtains, or make things feel segmented. It might seem challenging at first to deal with an open concept in a smaller space (it might feel like there’s no privacy whatsoever), but when it comes to small spaces, open concepts tend to work best and make it feel more open, airy, and even bigger.

Think Mobile When it Comes to Reception

Who says you have to take up a huge chunk of your space for a reception desk. Everything is mobile now anyway! Play with the idea of setting up an iPad with a chip reader as your reception space so that you can maximize the space for irreplaceable equipment (like shampoo stations, mirrors, chairs, etc.).

Big or small, your salon is your space—so do what feels right to you!

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