As the beauty industry prepares to reopen for business from this Saturday 30 May, salons have been overwhelmed with bookings after the two-month closure due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Owner of Franklin salon, The Beautique, Jessica Peris said she received over 100 bookings within just one hour of announcing the 3 June reopening date.
“We hadn’t even launched to the public yet, that was just from our VIP list,” Ms Peris said.
“I think people want to feel good again. We have people booking in for tans without having events to go to, they just want to feel nice.”
An ACT Government announcement earlier this week permitted beauty salons to open from this weekend, while following strict social distancing and health and safety measures.
Ms Peris said The Beautique, which focuses mainly on nail treatments, would be offering all its usual services while increasing hygiene practices.
“With physical distancing measures, we are only using two out of four of our nail benches and we are using a middle bench as a makeshift nail station,” she said.
“We already have a really high hygiene standard, but we are going with the glitter approach – you know, once you touch it it’s everywhere.”
Since the salon’s closure on 25 March, Ms Peris and her staff created at home nail and eyebrow maintenance kits for clients to purchase and remained active on The Beautique’s social media.
“We just decided to be really active on our social media by offering tutorials on different things for our followers,” she said.
“We also have an online store and we offered free contactless delivery for orders over $50 which kept us extremely busy in the lead up to Mother’s Day.”
The salon will initially open from Wednesday to Saturday each week, however Ms Peris said she may extend that to Tuesday if bookings continue.
Ms Peris said while she was looking forward to reopening the salon and welcoming clients back, she had enjoyed focusing on her business during the shutdown.
“I feel like having a bit of a break was really good thing for us to reset and get creative with the business again,” she said.
“We were so busy before the shutdown, so it was nice to have that time.”
