As a hairstylist, personal branding and self-promotion are crucial for success. By creating a personal brand image for you and your hairstyling business, you are presenting your skills to potential clients and showcasing what they can expect from your services.
A strong brand presence will make you stand out from competitors, help you grow your business, attract new clients, and build trust and loyalty with existing clients.
To help you build your own personal brand as a hairstylist, in this blog post we will review the benefits of personal branding for hairstylists, provide actionable tips for building your brand, and analyze examples of hairstylists who have built awesome personal brands to support their career growth.
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One of the main benefits of personal branding for hairstylists is that it helps you differentiate from others in your industry. Given that there are thousands of talented hairstylists, and likely talented hairstylists in your city, clients have a lot of options to choose from in terms of who to trust with their hair.
By building a personal brand, you will be more recognizable to clients and have a clearly defined style and skillest that they know you for. People often associate well-known brand names with quality, which means that a strong brand presence can enhance your reputation in the beauty industry.
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Whether you are an expert colorist specializing in techniques such as balayage and foliage, or are good at different haircutting techniques like thinning, texturizing, and razor work, a personal brand is a medium for showcasing those skills.
Hence, it is recommended to visualize your brand by making posts representing you as a hairstylist. This can include:
This content will show the variety of skills you possess and what type of results people can get after visiting your salon.
Related: The Importance of Personal Branding
Nowadays, social media is the best way of acquiring brand exposure. Growing your social media profiles and showcasing your work will help you become a recognized name in the beauty industry and attract more clients.
You can create business or personal social media accounts to promote your brand and regularly promote your work and ideas.
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In addition to the obvious financial benefit of attracting new clients, you can also monetize your personal brand in other ways. These include:
Connecting with other hairstylists and businesses can also benefit your brand. As style trends are constantly changing, you need to be up to date with all of the changes and work towards improving your skills.
By connecting with other other professional hairstylists, you can learn more tips and strategies for styling hair, emulate the way they build their businesses as entrepreneurs, and follow their marketing strategies to build your brand successfully.
Related: Personal Brand Audit: Assess Your Personal Brand
Now that we are clear on the benefits of building a personal brand as a hairstylist, let’s look at some personal branding tips you can use in order to receive those benefits.
One of the key themes from these tips is that they involve visually showcasing your work. Hairstyling is a visual art, and you need marketing platforms that enable you to promote your work visually to demonstrate your skills and the quality of your capabilities.
If you are considering building your personal brand as a hairstylist, try focusing on visual platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. These platforms offer content types like images, short form video, and longer videos that you can use to showcase your work as a hairstylist and share videos with tips and advice. People also tend to go to these platforms for consuming content related to their personal lives.
Platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter might be less important, or secondary platforms given they have more professionally focused audiences and visual content is not the primary content format. Although, they do all need hair and beauty products and services, so there might be an opportunity to experiment there by trying to build a hairstylist personal brand on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Related: The Pros and Cons of Personal Branding + Bonus Tips for Avoiding the Cons
Engaging with other professionals in the hairstylist community is another great tip that will benefit your own personal brand growth.
Also, following professionals with strong brand presence may inspire you and give you new strategies as you analyze the way they promote their work.
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Building a relationship with your clients is of the utmost importance when it comes to your personal branding goals as a hairstylist. In addition to posting photos of your work yourself, encouraging clients to post photos is a great way to gain recognition for your brand and to get referrals for new clients. This way, your brand will reach a larger audience, and you can expand your clientele.
Positive reviews are another important aspect of growing your business. If a client isn’t comfortable sharing a photo of themselves styled by you on their social media platforms, perhaps they are willing to post a review about your services on a site like Yelp.
Related: The Pros and Cons of Personal Branding + Bonus Tips for Avoiding the Cons
As we discussed, there are multiple things to consider regarding personal branding for hairstylists. Now that you are familiar with the benefits and suggestions for building your own brand, let’s look at a few examples of hairstylists who have built great personal brands and discuss what made them successful.
Whether you are a hairstyling student or a seasoned professional looking to take the next steps in your career, there are valuable insights you can learn from these hairstylists in terms of the way they market themselves and engage with clients.
A good example of personal branding is Sky Kim, a Korean-American hairstylist and contemporary artist based in the United States. As you can see on her Instagram profile, the artist has chosen to keep things personal with her brand by using a picture of herself as her profile picture instead of her logo, and has a call to action and evidence of her credibility in her bio.
Kim uses her Instagram to promote the the agency she works with, the salon she styles clients at, and to showcase her work via photos and videos of people she’s styled over the years. She also links to her personal website where you can see more of her work.
The professional hairstylist’s content features Instagram stories showcasing her work as well as images of herself and her clients that she has styled throughout her career.
Ursula Stephen is a prominent hairstylist and salon owner. Once you visit her account, you will find that her content strategy focuses on promoting her business, as well as providing value to her followers by sharing professional hair tips and style ideas.
The hairstylist has worked with multiple celebrities throughout her career and regularly uploads pictures and images of her work at the salon. By doing so, she showcases her skills as a hairstylist, demonstrates her credibility, and creates content that other hairstylists can emulate and learn from.
Ursula also mixes in pictures of herself and photos from her personal life, as strategy and consideration we’ve discussed frequently at Brand Credential. The pro of this content is that it gives your brand channels a personalized feel. The downside is it may distract from the focus of your personal brand message (ex. Sharing hairstyle tips), or make you feel like you are sharing too much in a public forum.
As a professional hairstylist and a creative director of the luxury beauty brand Virtue Labs, Adir Abelger is another good example of personal branding. He is recognized for his unique style and takes every opportunity to express himself and showcase his expertise and creativity.
This celebrity stylist consistently showcases his work for clients on his social media accounts, and demonstrates his passion for what he does. His profile features various posts showing his knowledge and abilities as a professional hairstylist. Abelger’s Instagram stories are categorized and exemplify the different pillars of his personal brand, from showcasing editorials where his work was featured to introducing the personal side of his brand with images and videos of his family and dance hobby.
Related: Personal Branding Tips: 5 Things Every Professional Should Have to Build Their Brand
As a hairstylist, your personal brand statement, or professional bio as it is also called, should introduce who you are, the value you provide to people (ex. Your clients), and demonstrate your credibility.
For example, Adir Abergel’s Twitter bio communicates what he does professionally and highlights the values of his personal brand: “Passionate hairstylist; Aficionado of all things vintage; Devotee to all things beautiful; Values humility and integrity; Love above all.”
In order to promote yourself as a new hairstylist, starting a personal brand is one of the best avenues available. The practice of personal branding will enable you to clearly communicate who you are, what you do professionally as a hairstylist, and showcase your work and expertise across personal brand channels like social media.
To introduce yourself as a hairdresser, you should come up with a personal brand statement or elevator pitch. Your personal brand statement should lead with the value you bring to people, a clear communication of what you do professionally, and include examples of your credibility.
See these examples of personal brands for samples of personal brand statements you can emulate.
Professional hairstyling is an industry where personal branding is an invaluable strategy for growing your business and establishing your credibility. Follow the personal branding tips and examples in this blog post to build your own personal brand to promote your hairstyling business.
Hi, I'm Justin and I write Brand Credential.
I started Brand Credential as a resource to help share expertise from my 10-year brand building journey.
I currently serve as the VP of Marketing for a tech company where I oversee all go-to-market functions. Throughout my career I've helped companies scale revenue to millions of dollars, helped executives build personal brands, and created hundreds of pieces of content since starting to write online in 2012.
As always, thank you so much for reading. If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:
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