Michael Portman of Birds Barbershop on Creating a Killer In-Store Experience
1. We know that the Five Senses are important to your in-store experience. Can you walk us through the customer experience you’ve created?
Many hair salons can be smelly, ugly places. We want our clients to be transported upon entry to a place where the music is worth turning up and everything they see is eye candy. We don’t want them touching old curled magazines or smelling burned perm hair. We want them sipping a Shiner Bock and wondering where Birds Barbershop has been all their lives.
2. Every Birds Barbershop store is different, yet they are all unmistakably Birds. Why is this important?
A haircut is one of the last things left that you can’t get on the Internet. Now more than ever, experience is everything in brick-and-mortars, and we believe that if the space isn’t dialed in to its most localized, authentic experience then we aren’t doing our job to thrill the client every second they are inside a Birds. Same-old same-old just doesn’t cut it anymore.
3. What advice would you give someone who is starting a retail services company?
Niche retailers whose inventory is readily available on the Internet can’t compete anymore, which has benefitted service businesses like ours. If there is any way, shape or form that your retail product can be bought online, think twice. If it isn’t online yet, maybe that’s your play. From what we see, services and food are the only things really thriving in retail, offering a human touch in a world where you can buy almost anything without taking to anyone.
4. If you could have one do-over, what would it be?
There are many types of barbershops and salons, but we are all about convenience. When we first opened, we offered straight razor shaves — a luxury — like many standard barbershops do. But shaves took too long and cost too much to fit our brand, so we cut them from the menu altogether. We like doing a few things well instead of a lot of things half-baked. If the restaurant menu is too big, nothing is really all that great.
