Salons and barber shops move more often than most high street businesses, usually because a lease ends or a better unit comes up two doors down. What makes it awkward is that almost everything in the shop is either plumbed in, bolted down or startlingly heavy, and the business cannot stay shut for long. Booking van hire in Warrington for a Sunday to Monday window covers most of it. Moving a hair salon is a job where the disconnection matters more than the driving.
Everything Is Fixed To Something
Walk into a salon and very little of it is simply standing on the floor. Backwash units are plumbed to hot and cold and drain into a waste, styling chairs are frequently bolted through the floor or hydraulic and heavy, mirrors and stations are fixed to walls, and the colour bar has a sink in it. On top of that sits a great deal of stock, a till system and a small mountain of tools. The practical consequence is that the move is really three jobs in sequence, which are disconnecting, transporting and reconnecting, and only the middle one involves a van. Firms that treat it as a removal and book a vehicle without booking a plumber and an electrician lose the whole gain, because a backwash unit standing in a new shop with nobody to connect it is not a working salon.
Lifting Chairs And Backwash Units
Salon chairs are far heavier than they look, particularly hydraulic ones with a cast base, and a backwash unit combines a heavy chair with a ceramic bowl that will chip on contact with anything. Both are difficult to carry through a doorway and both punish a badly judged lift. A Luton van with tail lift takes the step up out of the equation, letting each unit go onto a barrow, onto the lift and into the body without anyone taking its full weight at height. That matters most on a shopping parade where the only access is the front door and a kerb. Wrap ceramic bowls before they move rather than trusting to careful handling, and take the chairs off their bases where the design allows it.
Water, Waste And Electrics At The New Unit
Check the new premises before you commit to a date. Backwash units need hot and cold supplies and a waste run within reach of where they will stand, and a shop that has previously been anything other than a salon frequently has neither in the right place. Electrics matter too, since a bank of dryers and a colour processor draw more than a retail unit is always wired for. Both are questions for qualified trades rather than assumptions, and both are far cheaper to answer before the lease is signed. Getting the first fix done in the new unit while the old one is still trading is what turns a week of closure into a weekend of it.
Stock, Tools And The Things That Walk
Colour stock, developers, shampoos and treatments are the highest value items in the shop by volume and the easiest to lose in a move. Box them by brand and line rather than by shelf, keep bottles upright, and separate anything already opened so a leak does not ruin a full case. Scissors, clippers, dryers and irons belong in labelled boxes carried by staff rather than loose in the load, because they are valuable, personal to individual stylists and easy to mislay. Take a photograph of the colour wall before it comes down, since rebuilding the order from memory in a new shop takes an afternoon nobody has.
Keeping The Closure As Short As Possible
Salons live on bookings, and a closed week is a week of clients going elsewhere and not all of them coming back. The usual pattern is to trade until Saturday evening, move Sunday, fit out Monday and reopen Tuesday, which puts the whole thing across our closed day. We are open Monday to Saturday from 8am to 4pm and closed on Sunday, so that means collecting the vehicle on the Saturday and returning it on the Monday or Tuesday. Short and long term hire are both available with no deposit required on most vehicles, and there is free secure parking on site if you would rather leave a car with us for the duration.
Telling Clients And Handing Back The Old Unit
The old premises has to go back in the condition the lease describes, which for a salon usually means removing fixed stations and mirrors and making good the walls and floor where units were bolted down. That is work in its own right and it needs its own slot in the plan rather than being squeezed into the Sunday. Tell clients the new address well before the move rather than the week of it, update every listing and booking system, and put a notice in the old window if the landlord permits it. Salons relocating around Stockton Heath van hire and Lymm van hire often keep most of their book simply because the walk between the two units is short.
Chair Renters And Freelance Stylists
A growing share of the trade works chair to chair rather than from a single salon, and moving between them brings its own version of this job. A freelance stylist or barber typically owns a trolley, a dryer, a full kit of tools and often their own chair, which is more than a car takes and less than a removal warrants. The same rules apply in miniature, which is that tools travel boxed and with the driver, anything with a blade or a heating element is packed rather than loose, and a chair goes in on its back with the base protected. Where a stylist is moving into a new salon on a set date, doing it in one evening with a small vehicle is far less disruptive than three car journeys across a week, and it means the first day at the new chair starts with everything already in place.
Tell us how many chairs and backwash units are moving and what the access is like at both ends, and we will make sure you have a lift rather than a ramp. Call the depot on 01925 396 222 once your dates are fixed.
