Loyalty cards for a barber shop
A barber has something most shops would envy: a customer with a schedule. Hair grows at a known rate, so you already know roughly when each regular is due back, and a stamp card turns that from a guess into a habit.
Your customers already visit on a cycle
A common cutting cycle is three to five weeks, and people tend to go back to whoever cut it last time. Your competition is not the shop down the road; it is the customer drifting to whoever is free.
That makes the card's job specific: hold the cycle. Six to eight stamps at a three-week cycle is four to six months, which is long enough to be worth giving a free cut for.
| Typical cycle | Set the card to |
|---|---|
| Every 2 to 3 weeks | 8 stamps |
| Every 4 weeks | 6 stamps |
| Every 6 weeks or more | 4 stamps |
A free cut is the obvious reward and the right one
Unlike most trades, the obvious reward here is also the best one. A free cut after six costs you a chair hour, not six haircuts' worth of product.
It also has the highest perceived value of anything you could offer. A discount on product does not compete with it.
The customer who has not been in for a month
This is the number worth watching, and it is the one a shop without a card cannot see.
A regular on a three-week cycle who has not appeared in six weeks has probably gone somewhere else. You would not have noticed, a busy chair looks the same either way. With a card you can see it, and an unfinished card is a reason for them to come back rather than start over elsewhere.
Setting it up
The scissors stamp is in the 27 and needs no explanation on the counter.
Barbers often work by appointment and by walk-in at once. The stamp is approved by whoever is at the chair, there is nothing to open, and no till to be standing at.