If you are new to the nail industry and you have decided you want to go it alone as an independent contractor rather than an employee of a nail salon, i must commend you because you have a very different journey ahead of you than most take, but the rewards that you can experience are far greater. The freedom of being your own boss can be very exciting, but isn’t free of it’s own challenges and issues. Deciding how much you and your time are worth is a very important item to address early in your nail career, and if you are still in nail technician school, you should make sure to ask your instructors what they would charge for various treatments, if only for their opinion to compare against your own thoughts on how to price gel nail services
Check Out Your Competitions Gel Nails
If you are mobile nail technicfian than your prices will inherently carry a premium because of the inhome service you are providing that many others do not or will not. If however you are in your own nail salon, you want to make sure to explore the different nail salons and beauty salons in your geographic region. If it is in your budget i would suggest you go get gel nails or other nail treatments from all the places around you to determine what they are providing their clients, and what they are charging for the experience. This can help you to add items or experiences to your services that may help you demand a higher price for your time.
I would suggest you experiment with your prices as best you can, but make sure to start your prices at the higher end of the services that you have received. A very common mistake and an odd bit of human psychology is that many people will not price their time high enough to cover what it is truly worth.
It’s Math Time!
Take an inventory of how much of your supplies you will use for a given service, then put a dollar price on that. (i.e if it will take you 20 manicures to get through a bottle of something, put a dollar value of 1/20th the price of that product) do this with all of your services, then take your rent and multiply it by 1.2, divide that number by the number of gel nail manicures or other nail work you think you will be doing within that time period. Your new rent number plus your nail supply numbers will give you a hard cost, the only thing you need to add into this is how much you think your time is worth and any extra budget that you may want to save for in your nail tech business. hope this helps to give you an idea of where to price your gel nails!
