Opening a salon in India: a practical first-90-days checklist
Registration, licences, fit-out, staffing and the systems to set up before you open the door — in the order they actually matter.
Opening a salon involves a lot of decisions in a short time, and the expensive mistakes are almost always made in the first three weeks — usually by doing things in the wrong order.
Requirements vary by state and municipality. Treat this as a map, not as legal advice, and confirm specifics locally.
Weeks 1–3: decisions that are hard to reverse
Location before everything. Footfall, parking, visibility from the road, and who else is within walking distance. A cheaper rent two streets off the main road is not cheaper.
Negotiate the lease properly. Lock-in, escalation, and — critically — what happens to your fit-out at the end. Salon fit-out is expensive and immovable.
Decide your positioning now. Premium, mid-market or volume. This decides your fit-out budget, your product brands, your pricing and who you hire. Changing it later means redoing all four.
Weeks 2–6: registration and licences
Broadly, expect to deal with:
- Business registration — proprietorship, LLP or private limited
- Shop and Establishment registration with your state
- Trade licence from the municipal corporation
- GST registration, if you cross the threshold or want input credit
- Professional tax, in states that levy it
- Fire safety clearance, depending on premises and size
- Health/sanitary licence in some municipalities
- Music licensing, if you play recorded music publicly
Start these early. Several take longer than you expect and some are prerequisites for others.
Weeks 4–8: fit-out and equipment
Chairs, wash units, mirrors, storage, lighting and — the one people underestimate — plumbing and electrical load. Wash units and hooded dryers draw serious power and need serious water pressure.
Spend on: chairs, lighting, and the wash experience. Those are what clients feel.
Save on: reception furniture, decorative elements, signage that you will want to change.
Weeks 6–10: staff
Hire the senior stylist first and let them help you hire the rest. A senior stylist who feels ownership of the team is worth more than the salary difference.
Agree commission structure in writing before they start. Retrospective changes to commission are the fastest route to losing the person you just hired.
Work out who is bookable and who is not — reception and management are on your team and on your payroll, but clients cannot book them.
Weeks 8–12: systems, before you open
Do this before opening day, not after. Entering eighty services at the till while three people wait is how salons abandon software in week one.
- Enter your service menu, with prices and realistic durations
- Enter your staff, with roles and commission rates
- Set opening hours, including closed days
- Set up GST: GSTIN, rate, and whether your prices include tax
- Enter opening stock with cost and sale prices
- Publish your booking page and get the link into your Instagram bio
- Claim your Google Business Profile
Opening week
Open quietly a few days before you announce. A soft opening finds the problems — the wash unit that drains slowly, the till step nobody understood — while there are six clients in the building rather than sixty.
The number to watch from day one
Chair utilisation: the share of your bookable hours that are actually booked. Revenue in month one tells you about your launch. Utilisation tells you about your business.