Hair Extensions By Char

Why hair extensions made sense as a business model

When my girlfriend and I decided to start a new company, we weren’t looking for something flashy. We wanted a model that was simple, predictable, and future-proof.

Extensions checked every box (FENBI):

• Familiar: not because we knew hairdressing, but because we understood what salons actually struggle with: client experience, hiring, marketing, scaling.
• Easy to target: women who want longer, fuller hair. No vague personas, just a clearly defined audience.
• Need: it’s not a “nice to have,” it’s emotional for our clients. Clients are willing to pay.
• Budget: every treatment is €400–€900. With repeat visits.
• Increasing market: growing ~10% year over year, and not something AI can automate away.

We had the leverage we didn’t have in our other businesses.

Online, one algorithm update or policy change can wipe you out overnight (I’ve lived that). Offline salons looked slower from the outside. But in reality, they’re resilient.

Once you nail the playbook, it’s copy-paste.

Launching fast, proving demand even faster

We didn’t wait for perfection. From idea to opening, our first salon launched in 100 days. Fully remote.

We secured a loan from Qredits while still in Bali, invested €85k (half savings, half borrowed), ordered €12k of hair, and hired stylists. Fourteen days before opening, we were still on the other side of the world.

But speed creates clarity. That sprint forced us to focus only on what mattered.

And when invisible weaves exploded in popularity, we didn’t bet €25k upfront.

For a few days, we added one extra question to our price request form:

“Which method are you interested in?”

👉 Keratin wax (our core service)
👉 Invisible weaves (not even available yet)

No ads. No landing pages. Just data.

52% picked invisible weaves. That signal gave us the green light.

The result wasn’t just a new service. It nearly doubled the business: higher conversions, better retention, and longer lifetime value.

Subscriptions and retention: the compounding engine

Most salon owners chase margin. We chased retention.

Keratin wax brought clients back every 3–4 months. Decent, but nothing special. Invisible weaves shifted the rhythm, clients came back every 6–8 weeks for move-ups. The same set of hair lasted ~8 months.

Then came subscriptions.

Not gimmicks, not discounts. Full-service packages spread over months. Clients locked in for 8+ months. Enough time to build loyalty, enough time to make them stay for years.

Even with 4.5% of revenue lost to late or missed payments, the net gain is bigger. The extra retention outweighs the downside.

Because growth doesn’t come from squeezing margins. It comes from stretching relationships.

The Hague: when hiring almost killed us

Not everything scaled smoothly.

Our first two salons went fine. Then came The Hague. And it almost broke us.

Two managers in a row failed. One even flyered for her own salon while working for us. She sent clients personal payment requests under her own name. We had to refund, apologize, and rebuild trust from scratch.

Fixed costs burned thousands every month. The salon kept closing, reopening, and closing again.

That’s when we rewrote our rulebook:

👉 Hire slow, fire fast.
👉 One red flag = exit.

Skills can be trained. Attitude, reliability, and integrity cannot.

Better to delay an opening by two months than fix the mess later.

Leveraging data to keep scaling

Once the foundation was set, we leaned on data to keep scaling smart.

The invisible weave test was just the start. Every major decision: pricing, marketing, hiring, was backed by signals. Not guesswork.

That data-driven mindset turned every new salon into a “copy-paste” launch.

The Hague taught us the cost of wrong hires. Invisible weaves showed us the power of retention. Subscriptions gave us compounding growth.

The chaos you don’t see

From the outside, Hair Extensions by Char looks polished. Beautiful salons. Smooth operations.

The truth?

When we opened our third salon, my girlfriend was eight months pregnant. We were juggling build-outs, hiring, and training while preparing for a baby. At the same time, my other company collapsed, burning revenue to zero. Nights were sleepless, not just because of the baby, but because of everything else.

We didn’t break. We came out stronger.

And that’s the real lesson.

Competitors don’t kill you. Dependencies do. Hair Extensions by Char was built without them: multiple suppliers, recurring revenue, predictable retention, and a service no algorithm can shut down.

That’s why today, it’s not just another salon chain. It’s a resilient, scalable business that compounds year after year.