The Unlawyer

I mentioned it before: no matter how tight a Filipino’s budget may be, the last thing he or she scrimps on is the expenditure for health, beauty, and wellness products and services. Visit any supermarket in the Philippines and the shelves that display such items as soap, shampoo, and similar goods are often positioned front and center, the better to attract shoppers.

A Philippine supermarket owner’s association confirms this observation: Beauty products still high on shopping list.

“LOOKING, FEELING and smelling good are still on top of the Filipino consumer’s agenda despite rising commodity prices.

“Steven T. Cua, president of Philippine Amalgamated Supermarkets Association, said local consumers still include beauty products in their shopping list even as food prices continue to go up.

“”Even in hard times, beauty products and vices still sell. Filipinos still want to look good, feel good even in trying times. Buyers, especially the masa, are also smarter and are now looking for substitute products to save on costs,” Mr. Cua told BusinessWorld in an interview.”

In so far as beauty services are concerned, consumers are willing to forego certain procedures but not all, in so far as the high-end beauty salons are concerned: How inflation is affecting hair salons. Salon pioneer Ricky Reyes supplies this insight:

““In this business, as life gets more difficult, people cope by pampering themselves. Problems may come but they won’t look dowdy,” Reyes says.”

Or as another hair salon executive puts it:

“Louis Kee, creative director of the edgy salon Razzle-Dazzle, says it is doing okay since it attracts the high-end clientele. “They need to unwind.””

I have my own story to tell: I almost ended up operating my very own beauty salon this year. A tenant of ours who was operating a hair salon suddenly abandoned his premises – he was unable to pay his rent for several months prior – and left in his haste an almost fully-equipped business in my company’s possession. Of course I was pissed at what he did running away like that but my interest was piqued when his former employees approached me a few days later and proposed to work for me instead.

I tried to learn about the beauty salon business as quickly as I could. I learned that a salon’s key employees, like the hairdressers, stylists, and make-up artists, are not paid a fixed salary but a commission based on the services they sell. I learned that except for certain styling chemicals and similar consumable items, the salon owner is not responsible for providing the essential tools of the trade. The make-up kits, brushes, combs, heck the very scissors used to cut hair, all of these things were supplied by the staff themselves.

I had reasons to be excited in running this new business: I was attracted by the healthy profit margins a salon could generate, and the cost of constructing a beauty salon costs less, on a per square meter basis, than what it would take to build, equip, and stock one of my stores. I was even prepared to act as my own salon’s spokesman, a la David LOL.

I learned about some of the darker aspects of the business as well. Like how certain stylists would deliberately cultivate a loyal clientele for themselves and not for their employer, an handy insurance policy of sorts when the times comes for them to switch bosses. Or like how certain suppliers would try to attract salon employees to recommend their products to their managers and procure the same in exchange for healthy kickbacks.

Thus, I marshalled my arguments before my company’s management committee and argued that we should at least give the salon business a shot. The only capital we would be putting at risk was a working fund which we would use until the venture generated its own cash flow. To cut a long story short, our company’s chairman vetoed the idea. We were committing to this business almost on impulse, he said, and that we knew precious little about the trade that we were practically venturing into it blind. As a bat.

Had we pursued this new trade, I suppose we would have become what this salon executive had in mind. Again, from the Inquirer article I linked to above:

“[Basement Salon executive Stefan] Wilczynski attributes the slowdown to management and poor location. “Salons run by hairdressers are doing fine. Many salons are run by businesspersons. They just hire a hairdresser and look at the numbers. This is a service industry. It’s hard to find professionals with proper training. Many salons still hire people who don’t know how to cut and color properly. There are many good stylists here and they make you look great for a day. But you have to keep coming back to the salon. That’s a luxury only a few people can afford.”

Come to think of it, we would have been at the utter mercy of the professional who would be doing the heavy lifting for us.

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Going entirely off-topic, readers disappointed with the decision of the Mainichi Daily News to can its infamous WaiWai column and its archives to boot, as well as “severely punish” its Aussie writer Ryann Connell may be heartened to know that a substantial lode of archived articles may be found at the Japanese section of the Asian Sex Gazette.

Without the alliterative headlines, unfortunately.