Zach and Dennis Neugebauer, Year Round Brown

Thirty-five years ago, Dennis Neugebauer was an insurance salesman with a tanning bed in his basement. Now, he has a multi-location tanning business successful enough for him to pass on to his son Zach. Although the salon has consciously focused on being the best at tanning, Year Round Brown has welcomed sunless under the umbrella and continues to evolve with the technology. Zach shares their experiences with sunless over the years:

It’s hard to grow a business if you have too many services you’re selling. We focus on what we are really good at, and try to be the best at it.

We started doing sunless tanning a long time go – sometime in the early 2000s. We brought in some of the early equipment and it was exciting, but the technology just wasn’t there. People weren’t always thrilled then, but things have improved dramatically every single year. It’s commonplace for celebrities to talk about getting spray tanned, and that’s a huge opportunity for tanning salons. A lot of non-traditional customers – people who never thought about entering a tanning bed – love the color they get and sometimes decide to try UV tanning, too. The services really complement each other, but sunless can stand on its own.

It used to be that color was streaky and inconsistent, but the results aren’t hard to sell now. The technology has caught up, so now it can be part of a lifestyle because they get that consistency in the results.

It wasn’t always a big part of the business, but as the technology grew, so did the numbers. We stuck with it. We figured that if we wanted to be known as the best tanning salon, we should be innovative and have every tanning service available. Now we have EFT memberships just for sunless and a membership that incorporates sunless and UV. We still do most of our business in UV tanning but we see growth in sunless every year. Sometimes people just get caught up in life and don’t come in as much as they want, so now we have something to give them a perfect tan in a matter of minutes.