The secret behind cheap “daily deal animal factory” laser farms
People often ask me how I compete with cheap daily deal sites …answer – easily. First off, I get all of the disappointed clients whom have been duped by some of these unscrupulous spas. When you consider that Groupon’s business model amounts to little more than electronic junk mail – vendors offering potential clients 50 to 80% off and on top of that paying 50% commissions back to the site and ending up with only 10% overall – you get a sense for how unsustainable that model is. I guess for so many, half off Thai food offers than many of us would care to stomach, the model may be workable – and if you’re using cheaper IPL or even used laser equipment I guess it’s easier to sustain that discount model – but seriously, when my clients, many of whom are knowledgeable medical physicians and other professionals, are contemplating services that involve expensive high end medical grade laser equipment – equipment that’s extremely difficult and expensive to calibrate and maintain, and they consider all of the safety issues and liability involved around poorly maintained equipment – the discount model becomes increasingly impossible to sustain….
Unless of course you create this animal factory farm where the woman come in for treatments that last on average ¼ of the time and are performed on ineffective “un-calibrated” or used equipment – what do I mean by ineffective equipment – well first of all its accepted that IPL’s just aren’t effective for hair removal. Medical grade PAINLESS lasers the kind you’ll find at our studios will run you over $100,000.00 – in some cases more, and we calibrate our hand pieces regularly – a hand piece out of calibration is completely ineffective but it’s very common for many “daily deal site” discounters to use them; in fact at our Oakville location we recently replaced a unit out of calibration for over $19,000.00 – that’s a lot of $60.00 treatments–and that’s just the hand piece alone.
Add to that properly trained technicians and spending the required amount of “quality” treatment time with clients and you begin to understand the differences and why heavily discounting involves substantial risk and requires sacrifices in time, safety and quality of service.
