When it comes to health and safety, salon owners are dedicated to doing what is best for their clients and employees. One chain of salons in the Windsor-Essex region has gone above and beyond to provide a relaxing, pampering experience to clients in a safe and responsible way.

2 Waves Beauty Bar has a total of six locations in Ontario, and owner Colleen Lippert has been working diligently to make sure each salon is properly equipped. Each one will have all the tools and infrastructure necessary to provide a safe experience for every person that comes through the doors.

Safety is not Lippert’s only concern, though. She says, “The experience shouldn’t change in our industry. We are in personal care. We pamper and groom ultimately.” She wanted to maintain the “beachy shabby chic” look of her salons, and make sure her clients still have a pampering experience.

So rather than installing medical-looking Plexiglass barriers between seats, Lippert and her team hired a local carpenter to construct barriers out of small windows.

“I took inspiration from my childhood home. On our wall there was a window frame. Then it hit me. Why do barriers need to look like a makeshift Plexiglass barrier? Why can’t they look like and feel laid back and relaxing?” she said.

“And that’s what we did. Those window barriers look and feel like they have always been there. We took those window frames and owned them! The windows look like they are floating between manicure stations and [we] hung them from a decorative wall mount at the pedicure stations.”

Lippert said she was also inspired to take an innovative approach to transforming her business thanks to something Premier Doug Ford said.

“I remember specifically listening to Premier Ford say, ‘Take this opportunity to be better.’ And it hit me that he is right,” she said.

“We will have time and energy to really work on policies and processes that are better than they were before. That’s really the job of an entrepreneur, isn’t it?  Find a need and do it better than everyone else. And in this case, we took our brand and blended it together with the Ontario guidelines and you get what we came up with.”

In addition to the window barriers, all employees will be equipped with personal protective equipment (PPE) at all times and each location will have increased disinfecting, hygiene and general cleanliness — though Lippert says those elements were always present given that the industry is already heavily regulated by the local public health board.

Additional steps have been added to disinfecting, cleaning, and hygiene processes to ensure maximum safety for clients and employees. Safety is always a concern, so a strong focus will be on providing proper training on the new safety processes and guidelines. This will make sure guidelines are adhered to properly.

Lippert said the goal in transforming her salons was to ensure safety while maintaining the “beachy shabby chic” theme.

“You can lay out all the barriers and hyper-cleaning you want, but it comes down to people. So we will be relentless on the guidelines and processes,” she said.

“It will be an hourly occurrence of reminding and hammering the message through. The store managers should just put it on auto-repeat:  PPE, barriers, physical distances, hygiene, hyper-cleaning and repeat.”

Their Nail Salon in Windsor is open for business as of July 1st!