What to charge for your nail art services
By Katie Barnes | 07 December 2021 | Expert Advice, Feature
As well as experimenting with your creative skills, adding nail art to your services is an opportunity to increase your revenue – so make sure you are charging correctly for it.
A question I come across at least once a day, is how much should I be charging for my nail art?
While we nail professionals may enjoy exercising our artistic flair and offering exciting new techniques and designs to customers, at the end of the day we are running businesses and not charities, so therefore cannot afford to giving away additional services and income.
If you want to practice techniques and designs, then use nail tips – the client’s hands are not for practicing techniques, these are for chargeable services. Whether it is a new technique or design, you are still offering them a premium service by providing this and should always be charging.
Nail art is an upgrade. All upgrades in other trades and businesses are charged for – this is the purpose of an upgrade.
You are offering a better, more premium version, and that, comes with an additional price tag. When you buy a new car, there will always be the basic version. If you want to add Sat Nav, this is an additional cost, if you want heated, leather seats, this is an additional cost. These are premium upgrades on the basic product, just like nail art is to a set of one-colour set of nails.
There are two elements you need to be considering when pricing your nail art; time and product cost. Many will just charge for the cost but when you do this, you are then giving your time away free, which could be filed with a paying client.
How to price for nail art (example):
Hourly Rate: £30
Divide by 60 (mins): 50p per minute
Break it down like this and it really isn’t much of an investment to your client is it?
Typical nail art of 15 mins: £7.50
However, if you’re giving this away for free to every client, you work an eight-hour shift on an hourly service this is £60 worth of income you are giving away each day. Over a week, this is £300 and a year this is £14,400 (if you work 48 weeks a year). If you have a property, this is your rent in free nail art you are giving away each year.
Maybe you only offer nail art services to ¼ of your clients – then this is still £3600 per year.
A great idea is to have a display of your nail art and display different tiers of add on pricing i.e. £5, £10, £15. This makes your pricing and services transparent from the beginning.
Often, a client will chose a feature nail to have nail art on, it can be beneficial to have a set of five nails showing different versions of the same feature nail with different price tiers to suit different budgets and preferences.
If you are using Swarovski crystal embellishments on top of the nail design, you could have drawers or jars with a price highlighting the individual price for each crystal. Imagine it like a sweet shop – who could resist?
This is just your time calculation, if you are using additional products such as Swarovski Crystals, chrome, chain, art gels etc then you need to charge a minimum of your cost price of this product for this.
Ensure you are valuing your own time and skills so then in turn so does your customer and stop feeling guilty for charging for premium services. Be proud of your skills and sell them with confidence.
Love Katie B x