How Lucas Salon Streamlines Their Color Management with Vish

The promise of color management app Vish to cut back on enormous product waste, streamline color management, and boost color profitability may seem almost too good to be true. It felt a bit like that to Derek Lucas, co-owner with his wife, Kim, of Lucas Salon in Epping, New Hampshire. But after just a few weeks and a couple of tweaks from us and Vish, he was 100% convinced. 

"We love technology, and any time we can integrate technology into the salon that improves efficiency, it’s a must for us," says Derek, who is a long-time Booker by Mindbody aficionado and was tipped off about Vish by us because we recognize the significance of cutting out waste for our partners. "We couldn’t imagine our salon not utilizing it now. The integration between Vish and Booker by Mindbody provides a seamless experience for our staff. All customer data is pushed into Vish, so the stylist doesn’t have to enter client details, and can fully focus on mixing and reweighing."

Derek recognized from the beginning the value this represented to his salon. It’s promise to slash costly waste and control inventory in real time, and to make creating formulas easy for the team make a huge difference to managing the salon.  But initially, integration of Vish into the salon’s systems faltered.

"It wouldn’t sync with POS or our client database and it kept removing the guest data so we’d have to manually enter each person," he explains.

Fortunately, rather than battle on, Derek gave them a call and they got in touch with us to find out what was happening. All it took was a call and it was sorted.

‘It was to do with the API, the bit of code that enables integration between Vish and Booker by Mindbody. But it was easy to work with Booker to ease the issue immediately,’ explains Joshua Howard, Vish co-founder and CEO.

Within a matter of days, Joshua had it sorted and Derek’s team got the green light to be really creative with formulas without any complicated math. They can now tweak amounts to get a slightly different look, leaving Vish to work out the percentages that ensure minimal waste.

"The idea behind Vish—that there is less color waste in the landfills or going down the drain—is amazing. Monitoring usages is extremely important, but it can be onerous to do. Salons lose a lot of money with over-mixing and stylists being incautious about how much product to actually use. But not Lucas Salon. Not any more," adds Derek.

In the case of Lucas salon, all it took was a little bit of communication and all parties were happy. Derek’s next step could be to introduce extra product charges for any excess product used, which Vish estimates could bring in nearly $4k in additional monthly revenue. But that’s for the future. For now Derek is enjoying the ease of linking the color bar to his Booker by Mindbody system and keeping tabs on every gram of color dispensed and sold, while his team explores the freedom Vish gives them to be creative.