How to pick the best color palette for your salon business

Color can be a powerful tool for making your salon stand out from the competition. But with so many options to choose from, how do you pick the best color palette for your business? In this post, we’ll discuss the importance of color in branding and provide tips on how to create a unique and eye-catching color palette for your salon.

Why the color palette you pick for your salon matters

Your brand colors matter because they differentiate your salon business from others. By establishing a strong visual identity that uniquely represents your business, you are naturally building brand recognition. When people see a color or two from your brand, they may think of you – that’s a win!

Picking the best color palette for your salon business is also essential for setting the mood. Is your brand feminine, sweet and flirty? Bold, mysterious and moody? Relaxed, chill and beachy? Colors play a huge role in the feeling people get when they see or think of your brand. So let’s chat about what makes a strong color palette.

The recipe for a strong color palette

Selecting the right color palette for your salon business doesn’t have to be difficult! In fact, simpler is better. Here is our recipe for a strong brand color palette:

• 1-2 main, identifiable colors
• Black or off-black tone (if that’s not already one of your main colors)
• White or off-white tone (if that’s not already one of your main colors)
• 1-2 shades to compliment or add dimension to your identifiable colors

How to pick the 1-2 main colors for your salon’s color palette

You might be wondering…so how the heck do I choose my 1-2 main colors? There are a few ways we like to nail down the main, identifiable colors for our clients’ color palettes.

Analyze the key words your ideal or current guests used to describe your brand in your initial research phase (learn more about polling your audience in this post). Identify 1) the most common words and 2) which ones you feel best define the direction you’d like your brand to go. Then use those words to start researching some color psychology. Simply type the keyword + “color psychology” into a Google search. While color psychology isn’t the only thing you should consider, it can weigh heavily on the feeling or vibe that you want your brand to portray.

If you’ve had your colors done by House of Colour, you can reference your season to select colors that fit your personal palette. Use those colors to help guide and inform your brand’s colors.

Consider colors you personally gravitate to. What single color shows up most often in your closet? What is the main color you see when you look at your salon or suite? While they may not be exactly the direction you go, it might help to identify and consider you personal preferences when you pick the color palette for your salon business.

Tools to help select complimentary colors

Once you’ve selected your two main colors for your brand, it’s time to fill out the rest of the palette. A common mistake I see business owners making is selecting too many colors for their brand. The key is to stick to no more than 5 colors that beautifully work together. You can refer back to the recipe earlier in this post. Here are a few of my favorite tools for selecting the secondary colors for brand color palettes.

Coolors:

When using Coolors, you can pop in the hex codes for the main colors you’ve already identified, then quickly generate several color combinations to compliment.

Pinterest:

Color palettes run rampant on Pinterest, so this is a great place to go if you’re feeling stuck with your brand colors. Type “[insert main color(s) here] color palette” into the search bar then let your scrolling go wild until you’ve gained some inspiration to help you define your palette further.

Prep your color palette for your website

While all website builders differ slightly, most will allow you to enter a set number of brand colors into your website’s design settings. Showit, my website builder of choice, provides 8 slots for your colors. All Franklin & Willow websites stick to the following color system. I welcome you to adopt this system as you prepare to implement your own brand colors.

How to not get sick of your color palette over time

It can feel intimidating to select a color palette for your brand. It’s easy to worry that you’ll get sick of your color palette over time. Is there a way to growing out of your color palette? Yes! Our main tips:

• keep your secondary colors relatively neutral
• make sure you select colors that are research and psychology-based
• select colors that are rooted in meaning outside of just being “your favorite colors” or picking them because “they’re pretty”

In conclusion

When you pick the color palette for your salon business, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming or left to the experts. You can do it too by simply following our recipe and tricks! Once you’ve selected your brand colors, you can continue building out your visual brand identity by selecting brand fonts and building out your font suite. To download our full 13-step checklist for things you should do BEFORE you make your website, click here!