Top 5 Tips to Maximize Your Piercing Profits | Painful Pleasures Community
 

Top 5 Tips to Maximize Your Piercing Profits

Maximize profits at your piercing shop this year. Check out these top money-making and client-building tips.
by Danny Tress Last Updated: May 15, 2023

Make the most of your busiest times of the year.  When you’re facing lines out the door, unwrapping countless needles, and piercing large groups of eager clients, it’s an excellent time to all of the ways to maximize your piercing shop’s profits. Check out our top 5 tips for bringing in more business (and more cash) throughout the year. 

1. Upsell Aftercare

Group shot of Recovery piercing aftercare products on a stainless steel table

Let’s dig in! One of our best pro-tips to increase direct revenue is to upsell your aftercare, which may require a bulk purchase of your favorite aftercare supplies. Stock up on high-quality piercing aftercare by brands like Recovery and offer it to your clients after their appointment. To upsell, of course, you’ll have to really educate your clients on the importance of reputable aftercare. So be sure to emphasize the importance of high-quality aftercare supplies for a happy and healthy piercing recovery.  

Upselling has twofold benefits for you and your profits:

  1. You won’t be sending money out the door by letting your client scurry off to CVS or Walgreens to purchase (potentially the wrong stuff) to take care of their piercing.
  2. You’ll be encouraging proper piercing recovery, which’ll bring clients back to your door even after the busy season is over.  

Oh, and here’s another pro-tip: as with body jewelry and piercing tools, your unit price goes down as you order aftercare supplies in bulk. So, we highly recommend loading up on Saline Wash, Smelly Gelly, and more.

2. Upgrade Your Jewelry Selection

Collage of basic body jewelry

Another sure-fire way to boost your sales is by offering your clients a wider variety of body jewelry. This can be as simple as checking out our latest body jewelry styles to stock your display cases. Keeping your styles competitive and up to date is an important practice year-round, but it’s especially helpful during periods, like spring break and summer vacation, when people are more likely to change their style and show off new accessories. However, if you really want to step up your jewelry sales game, there are a couple other options.  

First, you can offer your customers an in-house anodizing experience. Invest in anodizing equipment, then anodize your customer’s new or existing body jewelry to the color of their choice. You can tack on an additional fee for your anodizing services – and customers who are already pierced might swing by your shop just to change the color of their go-to barbell. 

Second, you can upgrade your display cases to really showcase your selection in the most stylish way possible. A more attractive display case will draw more clients to browse and window-shop after their piercing or while their friends are getting pierced. 

We highly recommend checking out Tilum for all your body jewelry upgrades. This fashion-forward brand offers plenty of high-quality titanium basics for fresh piercings. But it also provides an enormous variety of styles for any piercing, including threadless titanium tops and shafts for mixing and matching. And by the way: You can check out all the benefits of titanium body jewelry in our blog here.  

Plus, Tilum gives you 14kt gold options, so you can make some higher-dollar jewelry sales.

3. Offer Post-Piercing Add-On Services

Client getting a stretched lobe piercing from a piercer using forceps

Don’t let the appointment end after the piercing. Let your customer browse and pick out their post-healing jewelry at a discount. And if you follow tip #2, they’ll have plenty of post-healing options to choose from.  

You can also offer changing jewelry services, so they’ll come back when they’re all healed up and ready to swap out their jewelry. If you do this consistently with every client, and follow tip #2 to upsell aftercare, it’ll really start to add up: consider every client getting a piercing, discounted post-healing accessories of their choice, follow-up jewelry with changing services, and one or two aftercare products. This isn’t to say every client will purchase jewelry, changing services, and aftercare… but if you offer it (and you’re a good up-seller), they’re more likely to do so. 

Aside from bringing in more money, piercing add-on services make your client’s experience more comprehensive and enjoyable, so they’re much more likely to become return customers. This is especially true if they’re new clients who haven’t gotten pierced elsewhere before. Establish a reputation as a piercing shop that delivers the whole damn package from first piercing to quality aftercare to the best selection of jewelry.

4. Run Busy Season Piercing Sales + Offers

Client getting an ear piercing from a piercer wearing a face mask

Speaking of “the whole package,” busy season periods are an awesome opportunity to run special sale events at your piercing shop. Offer BOGO piercing deals, body jewelry sales, or special walk-in sales. Some piercing shops run walk-in sale events with specially marked-down piercing procedures in exchange for purchasing $20 or more of quality body jewelry.  

Make sure to advertise your sale. Hearsay and printable marketing materials like signs and banners work wonders, but running a sale is also an opportunity to leverage your social media accounts. Outlets like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter make it easy to launch sale announcements that reach a ton of potential clients in seconds.  

If your piercing shop isn’t already active on social media, now’s the time to create an account and start promoting yourself. The more social media followers you glean, the more likely you are to have a huge amount of business during peak busy periods. The same is true if you’re offering an irresistible deal.

5. Bulk Up Your Piercing Orders

Piercer's gloved hand holding body jewelry over top a table covered in piercing tools, including pliers and forceps

We’ve saved one of the most obvious money-saving tips for last: when it comes to stocking up, less isn’t more. Ordering your body jewelry and piercing supplies in bulk saves you money in the long run. How? Well, for one thing, your cost per unit reduces whenever you purchase tools or jewelry in bulk. For instance, a standard straight barbell priced at, say, $8.99 can reduce to something like half-price per barbell when you buy a hundred of them. So, while the final price tag of a bulk order might seem intimidating, you’re saving money overall because you’re not paying full price per individual product. Plus, you’ll be set on straight barbells — or whatever you’re stocking up on — for a while. This eliminates the need to continually restock as the busy season goes on. 

Another perk of bulk orders? You’ll have enough basic body jewelry, forceps, and corks to tackle a surge during any season. Prepare for the onslaught with large orders, and don’t run low while clients knock down your door. 

Brace Your Shop (and Yourself) for Big Business 

Use any of these tips above to increase your success, profits, and excitement any time of year. In fact, you’ll probably increase your client list as well. 

You can find our entire selection of high-quality body jewelry here. And don’t forget to stock up on piercing essentials and aftercare as well if your supplies are low.  

In the meantime, here’s to warmer weather, busier days, and maximized profits! 

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