This Salon Franchise Doesn't Sell Haircuts. It Collects Rent.

By Tam Goldsmith

Sola Salons flipped the beauty model: franchisees provide the space, independent professionals bring the customers, and occupancy drives returns.

Sola Salons looks like a beauty business, but its franchisees aren't relying on customers booking another cut or colour. Their job is to fill private studios with independent beauty professionals — and keep them there.

Walk into a Sola Salons location and plenty of money is changing hands. Someone is getting their hair coloured. Someone else is having their nails done. A barber may be finishing a cut a few doors down. The interesting part is that the Sola franchisee isn't selling any of it.

The beauty professionals inside are running their own businesses. They choose their services, set their prices, manage their customers and work from private suites. The franchisee provides the location and rents those suites to them, usually collecting rent each week.

It means a Sola owner can run a sizeable beauty business without cutting a single head of hair. The number that really matters isn't how many appointments are booked on Saturday. It's how many doors have somebody paying rent behind them.

Sola says a typical location contains 35 to 50 suites. Across 653 qualifying franchised locations, average gross revenue was $447,549 in 2025, while average occupancy in December was 85.1%.

Once you understand those numbers, Sola starts looking rather different from the salon business most people imagine.

The Stylist Pays the Bill

Traditional salons have to keep chairs busy. Owners employ or contract stylists, attract customers, manage appointments and often make money from a share of the services and products being sold.

Sola has moved the commercial relationship one step back. Its franchisee needs to attract the person who already has the customers.

For an established hairdresser, barber, nail technician or esthetician, a private suite offers a way to run an independent business without taking on an entire salon. They can control their diary, prices and working environment while Sola provides the premises and much of the infrastructure around them.

The franchisee gets recurring rental income from each occupied suite.

That changes the management job considerably. Instead of trying to sell another 30 haircuts next week, the owner needs to find good beauty professionals, help create an environment where they want to build their businesses and persuade them to stay.

It is a simple idea, but at more than 740 locations supporting over 20,000 independent beauty professionals, it has become a substantial franchise business.

Empty Rooms Cost Money

The model may be simple, but the economics still need careful management.

An empty suite does not stop the landlord charging rent on the building. The money spent creating that room has already gone out, and many of the location's costs continue whether a beauty professional is working inside it or not.

Occupancy therefore becomes the equivalent of sales.

Sola reported average occupancy of 85.1% for qualifying franchised locations in December 2025. For prospective franchisees, the useful questions sit underneath that figure: how quickly does a new location fill its suites, how long do beauty professionals typically stay and what rental rates can the local market support?

The answers will vary by location. A franchisee needs enough beauty professionals nearby who are ready for independent working, but those professionals also need customers who can reach the site easily. Rent paid by the franchisee has to leave enough room for the suite economics to work for both sides.

That makes property selection particularly important. This may be a beauty franchise, but a bad lease can still ruin a good haircut.

It Isn't a Cheap Franchise

The other surprise is the amount of money required to open one.

Sola's current franchise information puts the estimated initial investment at roughly $950,000 to $1.75 million, including a $60,000 franchise fee. Much of that capital goes into taking a sizeable commercial property and turning it into dozens of individual, furnished salon studios.

The investment makes more sense when viewed against the operating model. The franchisee is building the premises from which 35 to 50 independent businesses can operate, rather than creating a conventional salon with a large employed service team.

Once the suites are occupied, the staffing requirement for the franchisee can be considerably different from a traditional beauty business. The stylists are running their own operations, bringing their own customers and earning their own service revenue. The franchise owner can concentrate on occupancy, property, relationships with beauty professionals and the performance of the location.

For the right investor, that is a very different proposition from buying themselves a job behind a salon counter.

Franchising Makes Sense Here

Sola was founded in 2004 and started franchising in 2005. Two decades later, the model shows an interesting side of what franchising can do when it combines national experience with very local decision-making.

Sola can give franchisees a format developed across hundreds of locations, along with site-selection support, design, technology, marketing and operating experience. The franchisee still has to make it work in their own market by finding the right property and building relationships with local beauty professionals.

There is also another layer of entrepreneurship inside every location. One franchisee can create the space for dozens of hairdressers, barbers, nail technicians and other beauty professionals to operate businesses of their own.

That is what makes Sola more interesting than simply calling it a salon franchise. The franchisor supports the franchisee, and the franchisee provides the premises from which another group of independent owners can earn their living.

If those professionals succeed, they have a reason to keep renting. If they keep renting, the franchisee has a stronger business. The incentives are unusually easy to understand.

What We Can Learn From This

Sola Salons shows why some of the strongest franchise ideas come from changing the business model rather than changing the product. A prospective franchisee should spend less time worrying about whether people will continue getting haircuts and more time understanding local rents, suite occupancy, beauty-professional retention and the cost of filling a new location. Franchising gives Sola a way to put substantial local capital and ownership behind each property while giving franchisees a model already tested across hundreds of locations. Get the property and professional relationships right, and one franchise investment can provide the workplace for dozens of independent beauty businesses.

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