To tell you the truth, I am a great, long-time fan of innovative hair salon called It’s or イッツ, its 1st original shop is located in Jiyugaoka 自由ãŒä¸˜, Tokyo. (The photo is actually of their 2nd shop also in Jiyugaoka on Marie Clare street I visited today)
The hair cut only costs JPY 1,300 ($10) at It’s, while most other hair salons in Tokyo would normally charge JPY 3,000 to 6,000. (Yes, I admit I am cheap, too, like many others here and here)
The secret of that innovative value-pricing comes from their process efficiencies. For example, they don’t have shampoo service (which is not so surprising, though. I know some of you might not like it). Anyway, there are no sinks inside the salon and the cost for shampoo taken away.
But, what’s so amazing about their efficiencies is the fact that they don’t have a PHONE NUMBER; so you can not make a phone reservation, which is quite unconventional as a hair salon. Instead, they have touch-panel enabled reservation system placed at the entrance, where you sign up and make reservation. Once you make a reservation, then you can go out wandering around the street until the time of reservation, which is quite nice. But when it is crowded, you gonna have to wait for 60 minutes or so, which I can not afford. As an option, they let you make a reservation via the Internet as well as mobile keitai site at the premium of modest JPY100 ($ 0.8), and I always make a reservation online beforehand.
Not having the phone number for reservation at the hair salon is, in my opinion, quite an audacious idea. 　Might appear even reckless to most others. But, as the guy explained to me today, answering the phone and making the arrangements would be very costly and, I think, obviously not the value proposition of hair salon service offerings, anyway. So it makes every bit of sense, to get rid of it.
Not surprisingly, it is working quite well; the salon is almost always full especially on the weekend.
They operate 4x more efficiently than conventional hair salons, who are charging 3x to 4x higher price but at way too inefficiently turnovers. Each hair designer at It’s is wired with a NEC mobile gear Win CE PC to check reservation real time in their section. Not only that, the staff have to read all the mobile keitai and PC internal messages going back and forth every day (and probably, every night at home, even holidays), the life just like every other white color professional like me doing everyday. I was stunned and I’d call It’s the state of the art e/CRM system in place.
Their website is www.eits.jp