For years, the loudest conversations in franchise development centered on home services, food, and fitness. These categories have real merit. But a different conversation is happening right now – quietly, in a category that often gets dismissed as trend-dependent or vanity-driven. That category is beauty. And the numbers, the retention rates, and the business models coming out of it are becoming harder to ignore.
That was the clearest signal from a recent BrandONE-on-One conversation featuring Meg Roberts, CEO of Head to Toe Brands, the parent company behind Lash Lounge, Delta Crown, and Bishops Cuts/Color. What emerged wasn’t a pitch for beauty franchising. It was a detailed, honest breakdown of why the business models being built inside this category are outperforming what most of the industry expects.
Beauty Was Never a Fad. It Was a Category Getting Professionalized.
The most common objection to beauty franchises in development conversations is that they’re trend-dependent. Here today, concept-of-the-year next year, gone the year after. Meg Roberts has heard it. She’s also watched it be wrong for 20 years.
When she joined Lash Lounge, she told her father she was going into lash extensions. He had no idea what she was talking about. A few months later, he called her back: “Margaret. I have seen it everywhere.” That’s not a trend. That’s a service category that hadn’t been professionalized yet. Lash Lounge helped create that standard and grew to 140+ locations in the process.
Delta Crown is following the same arc, this time in hair extensions. The brand was founded by Jenna Bowden in Colorado Springs, who spent eight years building a studio model that addressed everything traditional salons got wrong about extensions: inconsistent quality, unreliable service, no long-term care model, and pricing that made guests feel like they were making a one-time luxury decision every six months. Meg found Jenna on Instagram – “at my age, you shouldn’t be sliding into anyone’s DMs,” she says – and the conversation that followed became a full franchise partnership.
The Membership Model Is the Differentiator Nobody in Hair Is Talking About
One of the most significant structural decisions in this episode had nothing to do with branding, real estate, or technology. It was the Delta Crown membership model; it’s the kind of decision that quietly determines whether a franchise concept becomes durable or disposable.
Here’s how it works: A guest gets their first hair extension installation. At that point, they enroll in a monthly membership that brings them back for a lift (repositioning the extensions), a shampoo, and a blowout. By month six, they receive a full hair refresh – entirely new hair – without a price increase. Same monthly fee. Fresh hair. Predictable revenue.
Meg compares it to a cell phone plan. That comparison matters operationally. It eliminates the biggest friction point for guests, the perceived cost of re-installation, while giving franchisees something most service businesses never have: booked schedules and revenue certainty. With a membership model, the scheduling unpredictability that kills most salons disappears. Members book before they leave. Staff scheduling becomes predictable. And the business performs better when it runs leaner.
5 Reasons Beauty Franchises Are Gaining Ground Right Now
This conversation is bigger than one brand. Across the BrandONE portfolio, the brands gaining the most traction share a set of structural characteristics that beauty — particularly the specialty segment — happens to check in full.
1. They are AI-resistant by design. Nobody is outsourcing a hair extension installation to automation. Nobody is getting a scalp treatment through an app. The services require human skill, ongoing relationships, and trained professionals. In a moment where franchise candidates are increasingly asking what’s protected from disruption, beauty has a clear, credible answer.
2. They benefit from organic, peer-driven marketing. Women ages 16 to 80 are the number one beauty audience on TikTok and Instagram — not occasionally, but consistently. And the members themselves are the marketing channel. When someone gets a great result, they share it. They tag it. They answer when friends ask. That creates a marketing loop that doesn’t depend on algorithm changes or pay-per-click fluctuations.
3. They operate in recession-resistant spending categories. Fitness fads come and go. Food trends shift. Home service needs fluctuate with housing markets. Beauty, in Meg’s words, “just keeps adding and adding and adding.” The specialization happening now – lash studios, extension studios, nail studios, full-service salons with distinct identities – isn’t market saturation. It’s maturation.
4. The membership model creates revenue certainty. As JT puts it: “it gives the franchisee a lot of revenue certainty.” For brands built on a recurring model, the question of monthly revenue isn’t a guess, it’s the baseline. That changes how franchisees manage their P&L, make hiring decisions, and plan for growth.
5. They attract operators who are proud of what they own. This one doesn’t show up in most franchise development conversations, but Meg makes it explicitly: “there’s a little bit of cachet in beauty.” Operators who are proud of what they own show up differently. They attend convention. They call their franchise coach back. They push through hard quarters. That pride-of-ownership tends to create better franchise cultures across the board.
Bishops Cuts/Color: The Salon That Wins Because It Doesn’t Pick a Lane
Bishops Cuts/Color fills a different slot in the beauty segmentation map. It’s a full-service salon — cuts, color, balayage, buzz cuts, kids’ cuts — that sits between the value tier (Great Clips, Sport Clips) and the four-hour luxury experience. What it has that neither end of the market has is a real identity.
No uniforms. Murals on the walls. Good music. A franchise app that gamifies the client experience and is meaningfully improving store productivity. And importantly: it works for men, women, and children. There’s no gimmick, no single demographic, no theme that boxes it in. That’s harder to build than it sounds – and it’s what makes Bishops Cuts/Color genuinely defensible in its lane.
Head to Toe’s work since acquiring the brand has been about refinement, not reinvention. Move it back toward the center where it’s accessible without being generic. Improve the operational infrastructure. Let the personality stay. That balance is what franchise brands struggle to maintain as they scale — and what Bishops Cuts/Color appears to have right.
What the Right Franchisee Looks Like
Meg’s ideal candidate profile doesn’t start with industry background. It starts with orientation: community-minded, relationship-driven, willing to trust a system, and, critically, excited to own something they’d be proud to tell people about.
The wrong candidate, across both brands, is the person who arrives with preconceived notions and challenges the system before learning it. JT makes the point that this behavior at the evaluation stage tends to repeat inside the franchise relationship. When someone isn’t “supple enough to take direction and to listen,” that doesn’t improve once they sign.
Semi-absentee ownership is supported – Meg is clear on that. But it comes with non-negotiables: attend new business training, come to convention, take your franchise business coach calls, and make the right management hire. What you don’t need to be is the person behind the chair every day. What you do need to be is present for the things that connect you to the system.
Final Thought
The franchise industry often chases what’s visible. Beauty has been hiding in plain sight – growing steadily, professionalizing its verticals, and building the kind of recurring-revenue, low-footprint, relationship-driven models that tend to outlast every market cycle.
The real question now isn’t whether beauty belongs in serious franchise development conversations. It does. The question is which consultants and candidates get there before it’s obvious.
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