Buying in Bulk for a Salon: What Makes Sense

Buying in Bulk for a Salon

Bulk buying saves money on the things a salon gets through and loses money on everything else. The deciding number is not the discount on the shelf, it is how many weeks it will take you to finish the container. Anything you cannot use inside its useful life is not cheaper in a bigger size, and with some chemical products a part-used container is worth less than a full one from the day it is opened.

Buy by how fast you use it

Work out roughly what you go through in a month for each item, then buy to cover one to two months of that, not six. Shampoo, conditioner, gloves, neck strips, foils, cotton, applicator bottles and color brushes are the obvious candidates, because they are used constantly and they keep. A treatment you use on one client every two weeks is not a bulk item no matter how good the price per ounce looks.

What keeps and what does not

Gloves, combs, clips, foil and disposables keep indefinitely in a dry cupboard. Shampoos, conditioners and styling products are generally fine for a long time unopened and for months once opened. Peroxide developer starts to lose strength after it is opened and every time air gets to it, which is why a half-empty gallon eventually gives you weak, slow processing. Powder lightener takes up moisture from humid air and clumps. Mixed color, mixed lightener and activated relaxer cannot be kept at all and must be made up fresh for each service, following the directions on the product.

Storing it so it lasts

Cool, dark and dry, away from a window, a radiator or the top of a dryer. Caps screwed down properly, because a loose cap on developer is the commonest reason a batch underperforms. Decant into a smaller working bottle rather than opening and closing a gallon twenty times a day. Label anything you decant with what it is and when you opened it, since an unlabeled bottle of something clear is going to be thrown away eventually.

Rotate the shelf

Put new stock behind the old so the oldest container is always the next one used, which costs nothing and stops you finding a forgotten case at the back. Note the date you open anything with a shelf life. Once a quarter, look at what has not moved and stop reordering it, which is usually more valuable than negotiating a better price on what is selling.

Lead time and ordering ahead

The point of buying deeper is that you stop running out mid-week, so place the order while you still have a couple of weeks of stock rather than on the day you notice. Weekday orders on kellybeautyonline.com placed before 2 PM Eastern begin processing the same day, with a flat $4.99 to anywhere in Michigan and typical arrival in 1 to 3 business days, so a reorder point of two weeks leaves plenty of margin.