Adding some colour to your career with Mark Gaye

We are honoured to speak with Mark Gaye: skilled men’s hairdresser and educator, director of The Notorious Barbers, founder of the Irish Barber Expo and founder of BDG. In this interview, Mark discusses hair colouring services for men, as well as how incorporating colour has led to greater artistic expression and financial success.

While Mark Gaye started out as a barber, adding colour to his menu was a natural progression of his craft. “I was doing really nice haircuts but there was something missing, which I couldn’t add in with a razor or scissors. It needed something else,” said Mark. “As soon as I started with colour, I’m not sure if it was endorphins or what, but I loved learning it. I loved the idea of the technical side of it. It's not just about pulling together a really nice haircut: it’s how you fully finish a look. Learning colours has brought a fresh new vibe into my work and I’m really loving it.” 

“My advice right now is to make the switch to adding colour. You can only try it and see if you like it or not. If you don’t like it at least you learn something about yourself.”

Why hair colour might be a good fit for your business

Hair colour is not a fad

I don’t think it’s going to go away, essentially. Colour has always popped up. I think as the barbering trend grows, right now we’re in a bit of a barbering boom, where barbers will push themselves a bit more and get a bit more savvy with colouring and adding that to their game. I think that’s what going to keep growing. There are so many people out there and so many different niches so colour is always going to be there.

Hair colour can open up your potential clientele

It’s funny because our recurring demographic which we standardly go after seems to be 18-24 year-olds. But when we started colouring, I’ve noticed that it’s actually the older bracket that’s coming in to get it done. Now obviously there will always be people wanting to come in to get their greys covered. But I think that it’s pushing more to the 24, 25, 26 area and it will only broaden as it becomes more socially acceptable. 

That just opens your doors. It’s not only the men that come to your door. We’ve had a lot of lady clients come through our doors and without being able to do the colouring, we just wouldn’t be able to care for them as well as we’d like.

Hair colour dramatically increases how much you can earn in one appointment

I think that adding colours to our menus will bring in huge financial opportunities because we can quite literally triple our prices in colours. Colour is an investment and people want to keep their investment up… [So] You can buy a good bottle of blue shampoo for 3-4 euro and you can sell it back 15-16 euro if you’re buying from your wholesaler. They will come back for the right products to keep it going right.

Hair colour increases the frequency of visits

I think it [the number of appointments] has gone up, to be quite honest. They don’t feel bad about coming back in, they feel like they are just maintaining their colour: keeping it fresh, touching it up. They might just get their roots done again because you have the right products to fit into their style and help them maintain their colour. 

So, if anything, I think colour helps bring in more customers and helps bring them back. The only con I’d really see would be not having an appointment system capable of handling your business opportunities that adding colours to your menu would bring to your door. 

So, I think that if you’re going to be doing colouring, you need to move to an appointment system to keep your business system moving forward, and your clients will appreciate it more to be able to come in and not have to wait around. But it also schedules your day so you can pick the clients you want to have, or you can bring someone else to do a colour or some style.

Adding colour to your work: Mark’s advice on getting started

Set trends and use social media

As a barber shop owner and as a stylist, you should always be looking to make the next move and not always just be replicating but also add to and break the mould a small bit. So I brought in one of my good friends and one of my workers and we put colour his hair because we wanted to bring this style in and bring the colour in. 

We set it up as a profile picture and it became more accepted straight away. We posted it on Instagram and social media and the next day we had people coming in asking for that colour from yesterday. It was just this knockoff effect. Social media is so visual- I think that if a picture is worth a

thousand words, that people want to be known as a thousand words as well. A lot of guys are coming in and they’re saying I’ve seen this haircut and they show you exactly what it looks like. For a long time, they just said- 'I want my hair to look like that but not the colour of it'. And now they’re coming in saying 'can you replicate the whole style?' and just by looking at the colour you know what to go off.

Proper point of sale

I think that if people are saying that they are not getting the recurring clients or stretching out appointment times, then I think they don’t have the right point of sales in play. That’s just having the right products at the point of sales times. To really get the customer to come back in the door for you.

Get a good brand- learn professionally

My advice to anyone looking to go forward is to learn professionally. Go down to your salon suppliers and ask about their products; ask about what brand gives the best support. They will put you in line with that product that will put you on a fundamentals course and as you keep learning, they will add you to on to more advanced courses. 

Once you are buying a product and sticking to one brand, most of this training will be free. I think the unique point about colouring is finding the brand that works for you. There's a lot of brands out there- but finding the brand that you feel you're comfortable to work with, that you know inside-out, and maybe, if you get it wrong, that you know the colour correction process. 

A lot of hairstyles that come in need colour correction, so it's nice to know the full process with that brand. You'll get that with a strong brand. I like Alter Ego Italy. They provide a lot of pastels, which are very nice, and a very strong range of colours… and their courses are packed as well.

Get the right tools

But also on that, if you’re going to be bringing colour into your salon, even while you’re learning, you need to get the right systems in place. You need to get a booking app in place. I said already, if Alter Ego Italy is my colour brand of choice, well Booksy is my booking system of choice because it’s just next to none. 

What it brings in the line of quality for the experience of your customer booking in, it also brings back to your barber shop and management side of your shop. It means that everything is planned out, everything is scheduled. 

In a busy barber shop, you simply can't adapt without the right systems in place. Even if you’re planning on expanding, you need the right systems in place. If you’re bringing colouring in, I bet you’re thinking about expanding. You need to get the fundamentals right and take everything in small batches. That's the way to get it done, really, for me.