James and Deborah Harton, Sunset Tanz

Six-location chain Sunset Tans is bringing smart tanning to northern Alabama, thanks to its husband and wife ownership team. Both Deborah and James Harton have professional backgrounds as police officers, which has influenced their desire to do right by their customers and their community. In the eight years the salon has been open, they have continually improved their sunless products and services to follow through on that mission. James shares how spray tans have evolved at Sunset Tans over the years:

When we started out, custom spray was all we did. It set us apart from our competitors who all had Mystic booths. Being new to the industry it was a foreign concept for [customers] to strip down and get a spray tan, but we got past the anxiety and expanded the custom spray unit into our second store.

Once we expanded from two to eight locations, we didn’t have custom spray units in all of our stores. We bought a company that had the spray booths. Now that we have consolidated, three locations have only booths and three have both airbrushing and the booth. We get requests for the custom sprays in the other stores, but they are our busiest stores and we just haven’t been able to add the extra personnel yet. At stores with custom spray as an option, everyone is required to learn how to operate it.

We have a couple girls who have been with us for a long time, and they train all of our new employees on spray tanning. We want to make sure everyone is trained the same way, and that we are specific about how to spray. We teach them to clean people’s hands and feet and be personable – ladies respond really well to that because they love to be pampered. WE also teach them to sell the retail products. We push the maximizers, and they have been a huge seller for us.

We feel like the industry has made a move toward sunless. It’s something that we are able to offer to a larger customer base – we have some clients that are very fair skinned, and they don’t want to try to achieve a tan in a sunbed. But we have also had a lot of customers that will switch over from sunless to UV. After a couple spray tanning sessions, they warm up to coming into the store and want to dabble in UV. A lot of those customers end up moving from a sunless EFT to an all-inclusive membership, since the price difference is only $15 per month.

We have an EFT option just for sunless, and it’s also included in the price of our all-inclusive EFT. For $39 per month, they can use the booth as many times as they want, or they can upgrade to a custom spray for $5 more per session. They can also get a discounted one-time upgrade to go into a UV bed. We have learned from the classes we have attended that we don’t want to close our customers off from accessing other services. We discount our EFT memberships well to incentivize people to give it a try.

For more information about the salon, visit www.sunsettanz.com.