We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tera & Jason Starr a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Tera & Jason, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

Experience is what people want and at Treadwell we are different from the rest in the combining of services we offer and experience. We are very paritcular in who we hire to give our clients the best services but we also make sure our clients look good and feel good from the inside/out. This is where the wellness piece plays into the inside/out at Treadwell. Treadwell means to move thru live looking and feeling your best. As humans we forget the inside of our body is just as important to maintain as the outside of our body. We offer services that help with this like IV Drip therapy, Performance Injections, Cryotherapy, Infrared Sauna with red light therapy. These are all wellness items that help us achieve our wellness goals in many ways. Everyone is differnt in what they need and can customize their wellness journey at Treadwell. Our wellness services are for both men & women. We only do men’s grooming and the cool thing is when men get a haircut you can get an IV Drip at the same time in the combined spade. When it comes to our IV Drip service we are also different from the rest in that we want people to feel good and we put alot of vitamins in our IV therapy compared to other places in town. When people come to Treadwell for this they will see for the same price they will feel better compared to other places because of vitamins we put into the drips.

Tera & Jason, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We are husband/wife business partners and locally-owned. Knowing we wanted to build something unique, Treadwell is a concept that we worked on for several years prior to opening our doors. Both of us came from a national retailer where we were fortunate to have experienced multiple functions over our 18+ years there. We are still learning as we go and since we are the 1st of this kind we are continuing to educate folks about Treadwell and what we offer. We specialize in men’s grooming (haircuts, beard trims, shaves, waxing, manicures & pedicures). We also provide wellness services such as high-dose vitamin IV infusions, cryotherapy, and infrared sauna. We believe that when you look and feel your best, the world responds in-kind.

What people may not know ..

While on the hair & grooming side of our business we are setup for men, almost 30% of our wellness clients are women. Our space is beautifully designed and everyone feels welcomed when they walk through our front door. We do market to both men and women for wellness services as growing our wellness services is important to hitting our financial objectives.

We also offer boys haircuts, called “Little Treads” for those under 12 years-old. Haircuts for boys has been part of our service offering since we opened, and we have been pleasantly surprised at the number of kids cuts we’ve performed. There are more people out there willing to pay for a high-quality cut for their son. Having two young boys ourselves, we recognize the stark difference between a quality scissor-cut versus the type of cut one might expect from a turn & burn concept. The boys also love it! Their favorite part is usually at the washbowl in the spa room, where they get their hair washed and scalp massaged.

We love to have a IV Drip Event or Party, since we have the space. We have done mom’s day out drips, corparate events, groomsmen party, birthday party & couples drips. They have been alot of fun and starting to do more and more of these. It is important to be hydrated with IV drip therapy when it comes to Big events.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

Men stay with their barber or stylist for 7 years on average so we knew in the beginning that getting guys to come to us for haircuts would be hard work. We’ve had to get creative to overcome this as best we can. Getting the right location helps tremendously. Our first location is in a high-traffic destination type center that not only has tremendous local pull, but seems to draw folks in from a much broader area than most. We target women for gift-card sales around holidays. We figure if they have $50 or $100 in their pocket to spend with us, that will compel them to give us a try. Once we encounter a new client we are converting him over 65% of the time into becoming a regular. We believe that our conversion rate is significantly higher than the category average. While we’ll get it wrong sometimes, we are particular when it comes to who we bring into the organization.

The flip-side of this equation is retaining existing clients. With both of us having retail backgrounds, we aim to measure the right things and understand what is driving a metric up or down. Sometimes this is easier said than done. Just like conversion, retention is the other big lever. We measure these at each location and the individual level. Now being in year two our growing sample size is providing us better insights. You cannot improve what you cannot measure.

While metrics are the result, we recognize the importance of the human-side, and the impact it plays on growing our clientele. In addition to talent, friendliness goes a long way. If someone walks out our door, more than anything we want them to know and feel that it was important to us that they came to see us.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

As tempting as it may be, don’t try to carry everything! Keep your assortment offering lean and effective. Prior to opening we worked with our medical director on our IV drip assortment. We’re fortunate to have a physician medical director is who passionate about wellness, micronutrient therapy and holistic care. We also surveyed the competitive landscape and ultimately ended up with an assortment that required too many raw compounds. Given the safety and regulatory requirements of medicine, once a vial is open it must be discarded 28 days afterwards. So we found ourselves wasting medicine and money pretty quickly. We culled the lower performing inputs and fortunately things have improved there as we’ve ramped.

Similarly we’ve struggled to get meaningful traction with cryotherapy. With multiple service offerings we have to make tough choices about where we deploy our adv dollars.

Contact Info:

• Website: Treadwell.com
• Instagram: goforth_treadwell
• Facebook: Treadwell Grooming & Wellness
• Linkedin: Treadwell Men’s Grooming & Wellness for All
• Twitter: Treadwell Men’s Grooming & Wellness
• Youtube: Treadwell Grooming & Wellness
• Other: Pinterest – Treadwell Men’s Grooming & Wellness