Cooper Delivered · Economy Month · From Behind the Chair
The $4.50 Shampoo Bar Experiment Started With a Bigger Question About Hairdressing
I need to say something about my own industry that probably won’t make every hairdresser happy.
I think we’ve become a little over-entitled.
Not all of us.
And not because hairdressing should be cheap.
Hairdressing has value.
But so does the person sitting in the chair.
I know what goes into that chair
I’ve been a hairdresser.
I know exactly what goes into providing a professional hair service.
The products.
The electricity.
The water.
The rent.
Insurance.
Superannuation.
Wages.
Colour stock.
Foils.
Towels.
Education.
Equipment.
The hours you spend standing on your feet.
And then there are the years it takes to become genuinely good at what you do.
Hairdressing has value.
I don’t question that.
But the person sitting in the chair has value too.
And somewhere along the way, I think parts of our industry started forgetting the second part.
“Know your worth”
Spend enough time around hairdressing content online and you’ll eventually hear it.
A hairdresser talks about increasing their prices.
Someone questions a $500, $700 or $1,000 service.
And the responses come:
Know your worth.
Charge what you’re worth.
Stop attracting cheap clients.
If they can’t afford you, they’re not your client.
You’re charging for your experience.
And some of that is absolutely true.
You should charge for your experience.
A business being busy doesn’t mean it’s profitable.
A salon needs enough margin to survive quiet weeks, replace equipment, pay staff properly and keep its doors open.
But I think we’ve taken a useful lesson and, in some corners of the industry, turned it into something else.
Charging more doesn’t automatically make you more skilled.
And charging less doesn’t automatically mean you don’t value yourself.
At some point, we need to separate:
“I need to charge this to operate a healthy business.”
from:
“I can charge this because somebody will pay it.”
Those are two very different conversations.
Your client worked for that money too
This is the part I think we’ve lost.
Imagine your client earns $30 an hour.
You quote her $600.
That’s 20 hours of her gross income.
Before tax.
Before her mortgage or rent.
Before groceries.
Before petrol.
Before electricity.
Before her children.
Before absolutely everything else she has to pay for.
That doesn’t automatically make your $600 service unreasonable.
A complicated colour correction might genuinely require enormous amounts of time, expertise and product.
But her $600 has value too.
That’s what I want hairdressers to remember.
She isn’t just a booking.
She’s not a dollar amount sitting in appointment software.
She’s a person who exchanged part of her life for the money she’s handing you.
That deserves to be part of the conversation too.
I once worked for Mr Monopoly
About twenty years ago, I worked for a very successful salon owner.
In my head, I called him Mr Monopoly Man.
He owned multiple salons.
And he once explained his approach to business in a way that seemed strange to me at the time.
Imagine there are twenty salons in an area.
All twenty decide they want the wealthiest little percentage of the population.
They all chase the same clients.
Premium salon.
Premium service.
Premium price.
But he looked at it differently.
What about everybody else?
What if your salons were busy every day because ordinary working people could actually afford to walk through the door?
That didn’t mean bad hair.
It didn’t mean untrained staff.
It didn’t mean a dirty salon with bargain-bin colour.
He still built successful businesses.
He just understood something I’ve thought about a lot as I’ve grown older:
There is value in volume, but there is also value in looking after people.
The person in the chair wasn’t a chequebook.
They deserved to walk out feeling beautiful too.
Hair used to be maintenance. Are we turning it into a luxury?
This is where I think hairdressing needs to have an uncomfortable conversation.
Haircuts aren’t new.
Grey hair isn’t new.
Regrowth isn’t new.
Wanting beautiful hair isn’t new.
For generations, ordinary people have gone to hairdressers.
But increasingly, some areas of professional haircare are being positioned almost like luxury experiences.
And there is absolutely a market for luxury hairdressing.
If somebody wants champagne, a two-hour consultation, an elaborate salon experience and every extra imaginable, wonderful.
But that doesn’t mean the entire industry has to chase that customer.
Where does everybody else go?
The mum who wants her regrowth done.
The pensioner who wants a haircut.
The young woman earning an ordinary wage who still wants beautiful blonde hair.
The person who’s been saving for months.
Do we simply tell them:
“You’re not my ideal client?”
Maybe commercially that’s someone’s strategy.
But as a hairdresser, something about that makes me uncomfortable.
Because hair has an enormous effect on how people feel about themselves.
Looking after it shouldn’t automatically become something reserved for people with large disposable incomes.
And here’s where I think we’re being hypocritical
A hairdresser can defend an enormous bill by saying:
“Know your worth.”
Then finish work.
Go to the supermarket.
Pick something up.
Look at the price.
And say:
“Bloody hell. How is THAT $10?”
We all do versions of this.
That’s the problem.
We recognise every expense behind our business.
But when we’re the customer, suddenly we want to know why something costs so much.
We want value.
We want fairness.
We want businesses to understand that we’re struggling too.
So why shouldn’t our clients be allowed to ask exactly the same thing of us?
You cannot demand that somebody respect the value of your dollar while forgetting the value of theirs.
Expensive doesn’t equal talented
This is another thing I think social media has muddied.
Price has become part of the branding.
Expensive can look successful.
Expensive can look booked out.
Expensive can look exclusive.
And sometimes expensive genuinely reflects extraordinary skill.
But the price itself isn’t evidence of the skill.
A $700 hairdresser isn’t automatically seven times better than a $100 hairdresser.
Just as a $40 shampoo isn’t automatically four times better for your hair than a $10 shampoo.
Price can reflect quality.
It can also reflect rent.
Branding.
Positioning.
Location.
Demand.
Or simply what a particular market will pay.
Those aren’t all the same thing.
And if everybody simply said “no”?
This is where the whole conversation gets interesting.
The phrase:
“People will pay it.”
only works while people continue paying it.
If a business charges an extraordinary amount and its customers collectively decide:
No. That’s enough.
Then something has to happen.
The business changes.
The price changes.
The offering changes.
Or that particular business model stops working.
That’s not cruelty.
That’s the market.
Businesses respond to customers.
Customers respond to businesses.
Both sides matter.
Yet somewhere along the way, we’ve become comfortable talking about what the market will tolerate when prices rise, while forgetting consumers are half of that market.
They can push back too.
Then my husband changed the conversation
We’ve been talking a lot lately about the economy, Cooper Delivered and where we’re trying to take this little business.
My husband came at it from a much simpler direction.
People are struggling.
We sell haircare.
How do we make good haircare easier for people to afford?
And that eventually led us to something slightly mad.
Our 80 g Cooper Delivered shampoo bars have been $15.50 with postage included.
But postage was never actually free.
It costs us roughly $11 to send a parcel from rural Western Australia, depending on the parcel and destination.
So what happens if we stop bundling the two together?
For our Economy Month experiment, we’re releasing:
100 shampoo bars at $4.50 each, with postage charged separately.
Same bar.
Same size.
Same formula.
Same ingredients.
We’re not clearing rubbish.
We’re not making a cheaper version.
We’re changing the economics.
Buy one and the delivered cost isn’t dramatically different from what you’ve been paying.
But put several bars into the same parcel and suddenly you’re not effectively carrying that postage allowance over and over again.
And yes.
$4.50 is ridiculous.
It’s not our permanent price.
My husband may have had too much coffee when he came up with that number.
But that’s why it’s an experiment.
I want to know what your brain does when it sees $4.50
This might actually be the most interesting part of the whole experiment.
Imagine two shampoo bars sitting in front of you.
One is $24.95.
One is $4.50.
You know absolutely nothing else about them.
Which one do you assume is better?
Be honest.
Because I’d probably make assumptions too.
We’ve been taught:
Expensive = premium.
Cheap = inferior.
So what happens when the cheaper product isn’t inferior?
What if you’re simply not being charged as much?
Will somebody look at our $4.50 shampoo bar and think:
“That’s incredible value.”
Or:
“What’s wrong with it?”
I genuinely don’t know.
And that’s exactly why I want to find out.
Good hair shouldn’t require financial gymnastics
That’s ultimately where I’ve landed as a hairdresser.
I want people looking after their hair.
I want them understanding their scalp.
I want them using products correctly.
I want people with oily roots and rough ends to understand why avoiding conditioner isn’t necessarily helping them.
I want someone who says their hair feels dry to understand that we should investigate what “dry” actually means before throwing another miracle product at it.
I want people learning what their hair actually needs instead of buying another bottle because TikTok told them to.
That’s what Cooper Delivered’s Hair Lab is supposed to be about.
Education before extraction.
Because good haircare doesn’t have to mean owning fifteen products.
It doesn’t have to mean a bathroom shelf worth hundreds of dollars.
And it doesn’t mean the most expensive product automatically wins.
Sometimes good haircare is incredibly boring.
Clean it properly.
Condition where necessary.
Treat it gently.
Understand what your particular hair needs.
Repeat.
I’m not asking hairdressers to race to the bottom
Please don’t misunderstand me.
I’m not telling a salon owner whose costs require a $90 haircut to suddenly charge $30.
I’m not telling somebody to sack staff, buy inferior colour or work for nothing.
I’m asking us to look at the fat.
Where can we trim it without hurting ourselves?
Where are our prices genuinely determined by cost and skill?
Where are they determined by positioning?
Where did we add something because the customer genuinely benefits?
And where did we add it because somebody told us premium businesses should charge more?
Maybe your answer is:
Nowhere.
Maybe you’ve done your numbers and you’re already charging the fairest price you possibly can.
Brilliant.
You’re exactly the kind of business I want people to support.
Because this isn’t about cheap.
It’s about fair.
Maybe hairdressing could lead the other way
What if one salon did it?
Then another?
What if customers deliberately supported hairdressers who provided excellent work at fair prices?
Not bargain prices.
Fair prices.
Would another salon notice?
Would we start competing on value again?
Could some prices come down?
Could clients come more regularly?
Could a salon make slightly less per appointment but serve more people?
Could the client leave with beautiful hair without spending a week’s disposable income?
Could both sides win?
Mr Monopoly seemed to think so twenty years ago.
Maybe he was onto something.
Know your worth. Know theirs too.
I’m not walking away from that first sentence.
Hairdressers should know their worth.
So should tradespeople.
Artists.
Makers.
Retailers.
Small-business owners.
Employees.
Everyone.
But perhaps the phrase was never complete.
Know your worth.
And know theirs too.
Because the person sitting in your chair worked for that money.
The person buying my shampoo bar worked for theirs.
They’re not there to finance our ambitions one transaction at a time.
We can build successful businesses.
We can employ people.
We can make money.
We can grow.
I still intend to do all of those things.
I just want to find out whether we can do it while remembering the human being standing on the other side of the EFTPOS machine.
That’s what Economy Month is really testing.
Not whether we can sell a shampoo bar for $4.50 forever.
We can’t.
It’s testing whether we can find our way back from:
maximum
to:
reasonable.
From:
What will they pay?
to:
What is fair?
Because perhaps good hair doesn’t need to be cheap.
But it shouldn’t have to be financially painful either.
And maybe that’s one small piece of the cost-of-living conversation that the hair industry can actually do something about.
Economy Month at Cooper Delivered
Before the end of September, we’re releasing 100 Cooper Delivered shampoo bars for $4.50 each, with postage charged separately and transparently.
This is a temporary pricing experiment.
Once the 100-bar experiment is complete, the $4.50 price will end.
Then we’ll use what we’ve learnt to set a new price that is sustainable for Cooper Delivered while remaining fair to the people buying from us.
Same bars.
Same formula.
Same hairdresser behind them.
We’re just testing what happens when we trim the fat.
And whatever happens, I’ll share what we learn.
Know your worth.
Know theirs too.
