With the help of interior designer Bruce Barry, Meiseles created six googly-eyed fiberglass characters -- Snips, Curly Comb, Jean Luc Le Spritz, and Flyer Joe Dryer among them -- each with its own song and history. The characters appear in laminated books in the waiting area. Meiseles modeled the characters on hair-care implements to ease children's fears. "I wanted an environment where humans and cartoons would interact," she says.
Meiseles's attention to brand shows prescience, according to James U. McNeal, president of McNeal & Kids, a youth-marketing consultancy in College Station, Tex., and author of The Kids Market: Myths and Realities. "This is how children think," he says. "It starts around age 2. Their first request usually is for ready-to-eat cereal, and it's by brand name. By the time they hit elementary school ... 92% of requests are by brand name." Last year such requests from children aged 2 through 12 translated into $286.2 billion in parental spending, says McNeal. Of that, $5.4 billion went for personal-care products such as hair items and bath soap.
And brand loyalty bred in young minds is especially valuable because it can mean customers for life. "If a business doesn't plan for a steady stream of new customers, the question becomes where will it get any," says McNeal.
Meet the parents
The child isn't the only customer in this niche, though. Parents are customers too. And the heads of the new barbershop quartet, as well as the CEOs of the two companies that were started nearly a decade ago, stress that they serve both children and their parents.
Consideration for adult sensibilities is abundantly evident in Meiseles's operation. There are no crayons, toys, or nonlaminated books on the premises at Snip-its. "A big issue when you're dealing with kids is sanitation and safety," says Meiseles. "And with cut hair all over, it's really hard to keep clean a bucket of crayons or Legos that kids are slobbering all over." Nor are there any specialty chairs; instead, each station has either a child-size salon chair or a standard salon chair (for older kids and lap sitters), as well as a big cushy "parents" chair, which allows moms and dads to instruct the stylist without feeling they're in the way. And parents aren't the only grown-ups whose happiness Meiseles keeps in mind. Stylists, she explains, use salon chairs as a tool to measure hair length, say, or to reach angles -- which is hard to do when a child is balanced precariously on a miniature taxicab or fire truck.
Still, for most children a jeep trumps a chair, and the familiar Barney triumphs over original computer-generated activities. When the cutteries cross their regional borders and come head-to-head, could the accommodations for parents and employees at Snip-its work against it? According to McNeal, companies should market most strongly to the decision maker. Up to a certain age, that's usually the mother. "There's a 100-month line that we work with pretty religiously," says McNeal, adding that the product or service determines just where that line is drawn. "Below 100 months, the children are often still deferring to the parents. Above 100 months, roughly, the children are trying to grow away from their parents and toward friends."
Snip-its, unlike its counterparts, has defined its market close to that 100-month mark, catering to ages 0 to 9 (7% of the kids' market) as opposed to targeting ages 0 to 12, as most retailers do. But ever finer market segmentation is the name of the retail game (Limited Too, for instance, targets girls aged 7 through 14), so the narrower a company's market, the more successful it may be. "It's very normal to try to target as many children or customers -- and we're talking about children as customers -- as you can," says McNeal. "But that's probably the fatal error for most businesses."
Thea Singer is an associate editor at Inc.
Mother and Child Reunion
Market research shows that until age eight and a half, children are swayed more by their parents than by their friends. For that reason, the Snip-its chain, based in Natick, Mass., is a model of cross-generational design. President and founder Joanna B. Meiseles evaluated every in-store element for its appeal to customers old and young. Here's what she came up with:
Proprietary characters welcome children and guide them through the haircut. Reasoning: The friendly characters help young children overcome their fears.
There's a "parents chair" at every station. Reasoning: Parents must be present to guide the stylist and comfort the child, yet they shouldn't feel as if they're getting in the way. A comfortable place for parents and siblings to sit also promotes a family experience.
Children are entertained with original computer games, stories, books, and songs rather than with TV shows or videos. Reasoning: Snip-its is intended to be educational and wholesome as well as fun.
There are no crayons, toys, or nonlaminated books. The chain's proprietary design elements, such as Snip-its characters and computer-monitor covers, are made of fiberglass. Reasoning: Safety and hygiene are paramount. In a space full of cut hair and drooling children, loose playthings and books with paper pages are tough to keep clean, as are structures made of Styrofoam or papier-mÂchÉ.
Specialty chairs are not used. Reasoning: Children are less stable in miniature jeeps and airplanes than in standard or child-size salon chairs. And specialty chairs present difficulties for stylists.
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