A rough estimates of haircut demand in a city
So I am going to the hairdresser about every 6-8 weeks, the average is probably more like 6 weeks.
My hair cut takes about 20 minutes and most of the time, this is also what I expect for it. For this, I am paying 15-20€ currently, while others probably pay more per minute of service.
For ease of calculation, I am calculating only short hair cuts (typically men’s hair cut, while short women’s hair cuts typically cost a lot more, for reasons I don’t get). I think that the price calculation for women’s haircut is much more diverse, as cutting the tips of long hair also costs you ~ 50€ or something, so lets start with a baseline of men’s hair cuts.
Financial Aspect
So from an economic perspective, a hairdresser working 8 hours, 5 days a week would be:
120 customers per week * 20€ / per haircut = 2400€ / week
This would of course be 10k€ per month (4.16 weeks) working full time per employee. Realistically, one has an overhead of something like 25% in which no customer related work is done:
90 customers per week * 20€ / per haircut = 1800€ / week
So let’s assume 7500€ per month of income from cutting hair full time. And only 90 customers per week - per employed hairdresser.
This would be 360€ per day and is already quite optimistic.
Amount of hair cut companies
But the original reason I wanted to investigate this, is the amount of hairdresser businesses in a city. I often have the feeling that there are far too many shops for a city and wanted to get a feeling of the demand.
With 90 customers a week, every customer requiring a hair cut every 6 weeks, you can serve 540 people per hairdresser.
A city like Aachen has 263000 people which would require 487 employed hairdressers. If every hairdresser has one additional employee on average, this would be 244 companies.
A statistics page shows that there are around 329 haircut companies in Aachen.
Not too bad.
Realistic survey numbers
It is hard to find much better numbers, as a fraction of such companies do not have to pay taxes, if they make less than 20k per year, various hair dressers or barber shops are not part of the chamber of commerce and industry (IHK), and generally, everything here is a mixed calculation between simpler hair cuts and customers which require more time. Therefore a general statistic is quite hard.
Still, I found different numbers in a report of a consulting company. Thsi shows average numbers per employee of shops they consult.
| - | Kunden / Tag | Umsatz / Tag | VK / Tag | VK / Kunde | DL Faktor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Durchschnittswerte: | 6,23 | 503,64 € | 38,70 € | 6,22 € | 2,81 |
| TOP Salons | 9,28 | 799,35 € | 109,42 € | 20,11 € | 3,64 |
So the lower numbers are the top 10 salons of the consulting firm. One can see that this thrives to be more luxurious and focus on the upper price segment, as the average revenue per customer is 503,64/6.23 = 80€. Much higher than I estimated. Of course this includes in average 2,81 services per customer - while I only ever get 1 - getting my hair cut. I also did not include revenue from selling other beauty products, which also generates additional income.
However, the customers per day are much lower than I estimated (with 12 customers per day), though this statistic probably does not include the short stays of quick hair cuts.
Final words
Generally, I find it very interesting to do a quick calculation to see if an amount of something is in the estimation one would expect. This of course only includes rough calculations which only make sense to get a feeling for the magnitude.
The customers per day and average revenue per day is much harder to estimate, as I expect it to vary a lot more. Still, it is interesting to use such numbers to get a feeling of business options.
Next up: business plan for hair dresser company.
Just kidding.