NEWS
Spanish chains
take a shine to UK
Two Spanish salon businesses are seriously eyeing up the UK as their next target for expansion. Marco Aldany, which has more than 400 hair and beauty salons in 11 countries, and No+Vello, an Intense Pulse Light hair removal specialist with more than 1,200 salons in 13 countries, including some in the UK already, have both confirmed to SalonFocus they have ambitions to make inroads into the £7.3bn British hair and beauty sector. Marco Aldany UK chief executive Joaquin Lopez-Chichieri and chief financial officer Borja Marquez Porral have hired property agent Capital Retail, which is now talking to five landlords in central London in a search for salons of up to 2,000sq ft. If successful, the move is expected to be a precursor to a wider expansion into other parts of the UK. Joaquin told SalonFocus he planned to open one salon a month for the next two years, ideally doubling to two a month by 2014 depending on the state of the economy. Major cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham would join London in 2013 as the company began to roll out a franchise model, he said. “The UK is a leading country in the hair and beauty sector. We believe our business model will be successful here and we see a very exciting opportunity to develop in the UK,” said Joaquin.
Marco Aldany operates a format whereby it charges regular customers less as a way to attract loyalty. “We love to reward those customers who are loyal to our brand. This way we also expect to shorten a bit those eight to ten weeks that the British take to come back to their salon,” Joaquin explained. No+Vello, meanwhile, is considering adapting its existing UK franchise model to extend into hairdressing, SalonFocus can reveal. The four-year-old group arrived in the UK in 2010 with an initial ambition to open nine sites. UK managing director Juan Cardenal told SalonFocus the company now expected to have established at least 200 sites in the UK by the end of this year and an ambitious 600 within five years. Crucially, Juan added that the franchise model had not included hairdressing up until now – but this was expected to change. “We see hairdressing working in the UK. We see that for sure in the UK,” he said. As well as simply adjusting the existing franchise model another option could be to bring “part of what we offer into existing hair salons”, added Juan. “These are options that would make sense to consider.” No+Vello has one company-owned salon in Soho in London and was expected to have opened a second in Tooting by this month, but the vast majority of its
MARCO ALDANY: UK MOVES
JUAN CARDENAL: NO+ VELLO EXTENSION
expansion will be through franchises. Existing franchised sites include Clapham, Euston, Liverpool Street and Finchley Road in London, plus Aberdeen, Manchester and Oxford, and the company is looking at sites in Brighton and Portsmouth. The company’s growth targets may sound ambitious but its record in other countries do give them some degree of credibility. The chain opened nearly 200 sites in its first six months of operating in Spain and Brazil and has rapidly built up between 80 to 90 in Poland. Franchisees in the UK pay a oneoff fee of £33,000 plus a £330 monthly royalty cost and £200-a-month corporate advertising fee.
Government calls on salons
to become business mentors
Hairdressers are being encouraged to become business mentors and pass on their knowledge and expertise to others as part of a new government-backed initiative. The Get Mentoring programme is being run by the Small Firms Enterprise Development Initiative (SFEDI), the government’s sector skills body for enterprise. The idea is that SFEDI will recruit and train thousands of small, medium and micro business mentors, with individuals either attending workshops run by selected training providers or learning online for a total of seven hours. Once accredited, the mentors are listed on the website
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www.mentorsme.co.uk as well as offered free membership of the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship and must be willing to provide at least one hour’s free mentoring a month for two years, passing on advice to businesses on how to start, develop and grow. “Hairdressing salons are exactly the kind of business owners that we would like to see getting involved. We are also working to link with organisations to parachute trainers in,” SFEDI finance manager Sarah Trouten told SalonFocus. Full details about Get Mentoring can be found at: www.getmentoring.org