Reopening spa, salon, beauty and wellness businesses

Hear from a panel of wellness partners and experts as and learn how to reopen your wellness business — from spas to beauty salons — and how they’re balancing policy changes, safety concerns and business needs. This webinar will cover:

  1. Current state of operations
  2. How to reopen your wellness business
  3. Services available after reopening
  4. Appointments available
  5. Pricing
  6. Safety
  7. User insights

Webinar Panelists

Reopening Tips and Takeaways

  • Many spa, wellness and beauty partners are planning to offer the same services but limiting to appointments only
  • Increased cleaning, masked practitioners and appointment-only services are the top three safety precautions a business can take, according to customers. Learn more in our webinar about safety & cleaning guidelines for fitness and wellness businesses.
  • Consistent communication with staff can provide great insight on what reopening would look like
  • Stay transparent with customers to let them know which reopening and/or cleaning precautions you’re taking, and what you expect from them

Common Reopening Questions

The webinar will cover some of these common questions about how to reopen your spa, beauty, or wellness business.

  • How are you currently running your operations?
  • When you reopen your business, how are you thinking about reopening, and why?
  • What do you plan to offer when you reopen?
  • How are you thinking about appointment availability for your business(es)?
  • How are you thinking about the number of services offered per day for your business(es)?
  • How are you thinking about pricing?
  • What advice do you have to keep clients & staff safe?

Watch the full webinar:

Wellness Business Reopening Webinar Transcript

Fritz Lanman: I am Fritz Lanman. I am the CEO of ClassPass, based out here in Missoula Montana which has not been a bad place to hunker down during these quarantine times. I am excited to be here with all of you today because we have been embarking on an expansion of our company, from just providing revenue for excess capacity for fitness partners to wellness partners and so many of you guys have signed up recently and hopefully you’ve seen a bunch of product improvements coming in through our partner portal. Expanding into working for all health and wellness providers is deeply intrinsic to our mission, which is why I was excited to host this panel today. 

To give you a sense of what we are going to do, we wanted to connect today because many of the American markets and international markets are coming back from COVID-19 shutdowns. We’ve done a variety of surveys both against our customers and our wellness partners at scale. And so we wanted to share some of that data with you, so we have a presentation and we will run through that. I am especially excited because we are joined by several panelists.

The first questions a lot of wellness partners have asked, ClassPass launched a video product where partners could livestream on zoom or instagram or facebook and being shut down, everyone was scrambling to figure out if there was a way to make money from digital. It was more a seamless transition for the fitness partners that ClassPass has because they could just start doing classes from home. Obviously a bit trickier for wellness and so the first interesting insight is that most partners in our wellness space did not decide to explore digital offerings during the shutdowns. A few tried livestreams and 1:1 services. IN general, the sentiment we heard from partners was let’s just wait and get through the shutdowns and then focus on successfully reopening. We were also very encouraged that only 2% of the venues that we work with are permanently closed. A large percentage were temporarily closed in compliance with government regulations but only 2% have not been able to get to the other side which is incredibly encourage to us and to to the community.

Geoff and Dawn, both of you are in NYC, hard-hit by COVID outbreaks. You are still enduring considerable measures from the government shutdown. How are you doing right now? 

Dawn Fichot, RACKED: RACKED is a dynamic stretching company so we are kind of a hybrid between the fitness world and the wellness space. Before this we had been offering 1:1 stretching services, which is why from a ClassPass perspective we live more in the wellness space. When this happened we had already been working on early stages of working on virtual livestream options so we quickly accelerated that. We have several things we’ve been doing. We have 12 classes a week that we offer on ClassPass. We have 1:1 sessions people can book. Those are more sports specific, so golf courses for instance have started opening up in this area. So people can come and do a 30 minute session with us where we coach them through different sessions for their body for golf. The third thing we are doing we are doing a lot of corporate wellness. We onboard companies on to our existing platform or we set up private classes for them. That has been the biggest revenue driver for us during this time and the biggest opportunity moving forward. We are working with companies in California, London, and Baltimore and really across the country. And thinking about how we take what we are doing now and build not just for today, but things we are investing in from a livestreaming and video on demand perspective, making sure it is not just for the next 6 weeks that we are all locked down assuming, 6 to 8 to 10 weeks, but actually investing in things that will carry us through for future years as well.

Fritz Lanman: Geoff, how are you guys dealing with rent? Did you apply for any government loans?

Geoff Allard, Yihan Spa: We did. We applied for the PPP, the paycheck protection program. We also applied for the EIDL, the disaster loan program for small businesses. We applied to both of these. In terms of rent, we negotiated with our landlord that until we open, we would share the burden 50/50. So we are only paying 50% of our rent until we reopen. He’s been very supportive in that. The landlord is a very difficult call. Being one myself, there is not much you can do. If you have tenants, and you know they are good tenants, and if they can’t pay and you can’t evict them, you know they are the best tenants, you want to hold on to them. If the government is able to come up with a program to assist landlords, I think it would help all of us. 

We haven’t been able to open because we are still on lockdown in NY. Unfortunately a lot of our services require 1:1 touch, so there is nothing we can do in terms of streaming. That’s great that you can show people how to stretch. For us we do facial and massages. Everything we do involves touch. We haven’t been able to take advantage of the streaming.

Fritz Lanman: Laura, being in Atlanta, I am curious to hear what your experience was during the shutdown. Can you weigh in, or how did you handle rent? 

Laura Spitulnik, Laura’s Healing Spa: Operating a small massage therapy business. My priority is ensuring the safety and comfort of everyone, staff and clientele. When the state allowed business to begin to reopen, I did not immediately open my doors. I actually gave it another at least 2 weeks before I started to see clients again just to give myself time to network with people and consult with my clientele and other therapists in my network to see what level of comfort everyone was on and was dealing with. I wanted to make sure that – I wanted to protect myself and everyone else and everyone who was part of my business before saying let’s just start back. I think everyone is taking precautions. Even though it was difficult to be in this space of uncertainty, there was a sweetness to it too. What is the silver lining? What can we do better once we can reconnect with everyone again? I didn’t immediately start up because it was a time to test the waters. My method of operation is that I have online scheduling available, and also when I am partnering with Classpass, and people can book through the app. 

I am asking everyone to schedule in advance. I am not seeing walk-ins. I am having a consultation before to make sure it is the right time and we are giving the right treatment to our customers. 

How to reopen your wellness business

Fritz Lanman: We asked our  partners what percentage would immediately reopen and how are partners thinking about phased reopening. 64% of our partners are planning to immediately reopen. I think some of our Atlanta partners were more conservative since it was a bit earlier there. I think it depends on how owners feel about the COVID situation in their particular city. As we get into it more, people are thinking about reopening and their current situation. 

Geoff and Dawn, how are you thinking about reopening your business?

Geoff Allard, Yihan Spa: We will reopen immediately. We had very high hygiene protocols before COVID-19. All of our staff wore masks and our hygiene protocol  required that our staff wash their hands prior to treatment. During the treatment, like a massage, where you change position, they would again sanitize their hands. All of this was observed by our customers. We will pay attention to our high-touch areas. Just prior to closing, on March 16th, but leading up to that, we had already implemented a lot of hygiene protocols. We will make some changes. We will automate as much of the check-in as possible so that people are not filling out forms. We will try to avoid as many cash transactions as possible. We have a reservation system where they can go on our website and book appointments so we will try to drive appointment traffic to our website. We will limit the amount of walk-ins that we will accept. We will implement certain procedures. All customers, we will ask that they wear a mask. We will do a screening questionnaire before every appointment. We will ask them if they have had a cough or a fever or have they been around someone who shows symptoms or who has the virus. We will be able to do it online. If they show up and they don’t have a mask, we will provide them with one. Our aestheticians will wear a sneeze screen, one of the safe masks, with a seal, because they have very close contact with the customer when doing the facials. They will also wear surgical gloves. With massage we will not be able to accommodate treatment with gloves. 

We will have somebody who actually opens the door for you. We will minimize high-touch areas. We will continue to very obviously show customers that we are disinfecting every place from the bathroom to the shower. We use a disposable sheet on every massage table that gets disposed of after every treatment. We change the sheet under that sheet after every treatment. We will continue to do that. 

We will use no touch infrared thermometers for all employees. Any employee with over 100 degrees Fahrenheit will not be able to work. We have a process for allowing the employee to come back to work. Each employee will be very responsible for their customer. If we have a customer who goes to the bathroom or uses the shower, our employee will be responsible for cleaning that every time. We will include intervals between appointments. We will minimize the amount of appointments. We don’t want too many people in the check-in area. We are a small boutique place. We don’t have the ability to accommodate a lot of appointments. We will need to allow 15-20 minutes between appointments to disinfect. We will open and close doors for customers so we limit how they are exposed. 

Check out our other COVID-19 partner resources to learn about reopening, hosting outdoor classes, safety and cleanliness and more.

Want more information on reopening your business? Don’t forget to subscribe to the After Class newsletter for updates on facilities management, business owner insights and more. 

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