It can feel like everyone is trying to open a salon these days. Or a beauty and spa center. Or nail tech. Massage therapy, esthetician, organic soap maker, beard trimm… 1st stop? Logos!
The point is… Competition is fierce. How can you stick out, and win, against the competition?
Your branding!
The vast variety of products and services in the beauty and spa world is actually helpful. It’s a unique advantage for you to set yourself apart.
Branding, and specifically your logo, is the first and lowest cost way you can claim your piece of this industry!
Let’s look at some of your first challenges in beauty and spa logo branding:
How you start is vital and can set you on the path to success or failure
Table of content
- Let's tackle some of the important things to consider when discussing beauty & spa logos and branding.
- 1. Industry related
- 2. Nuances of the beauty logo
- 3. The list of 5 most popular trends for beauty & spa logos
- 4. Some of our unique ideas
- 5. Recommendations
1. Industry related
We can clearly differentiate between at least main 3 gangs operating in the beauty and spa neighborhood.
Here they are:
- The makers of goods
- The distributors of those products
- Places where those products and the associated services are used or retailed.
People are here to make profit from all stages and so should you!
How can you get started with low capital and low industry presence in the beginning?
There is a lot to break down in choosing a salon logo, hair logo, or even makeup logo for you!
Luckily we’ve surveyed the barbers or spa logo world, and simply broken it down in these next paragraphs. Read on…
As you drive past rows of salon after spa after wellness place in your town, you may worry
“Is there room for me?”
Can your brand stick out above the competition?
Luckily human health is one of those things that we will always need, no matter what’s in our wallets
Whether managing their stress, their hair or their hangnails, wellness and staying beautiful is one the first things people luxury spend on. It’s how people keep up the most basic part of existence, their bodies.
So no worries. Your brand style just needs to look official, professional, like you know what you’re doing.
Can’t be messing up people’s hair!
Essentially, keep up with the competition. There is not as much need to inspire desire with a fancy convoluted design.
Your talented hands will take care of the rest of your marketing, as your skills will spread through word of mouth.
2. Nuances of the beauty logo
We’ve personally sold Beauty & Spa themed logos to customers ranging from cleaners, to clean food deliverers, to clothes makers, travel agencies, and investment banks. It’s truly not just hair salons that want that beauty and spa look. It is a distinctive style, which is why certain customers insist on having it regardless
As the self starter, which you are one of many in this industry, you probably don’t have the funds to hire a freelancer to draw up a personalized design for you. You may also come across online propositions such as “design competitions”, where you send out your general vision and dozens of designers submit designs, from which you pick the “winner”.While this may sound like a great deal, the quality is not guaranteed, as the majority of designers will not put professional effort into something that has low odds of selling at all.
A design from a quality controlled collection is a perfect middle ground. The designers know their logos will sell, so the due diligence of quality is placed into them, and you get a professional design for a lower price than personalized or crowd made work.
Here is an example of Kanvas Skin’s logo across their different products
You will likely have your logo on a variety of different products. Think about how it will look on bottles, uniforms, and even as the sign on your store if you choose to do that. From the small sample offering to the big banner flying at a promotional event, is your image “scalable” across contexts?
Ardent Designs takes you through the very basics of creating a spa and beauty logo in this fun video
It is a careful balance. You have to present a luxury item, calmly…
Spending money can make people feel anxious. You must make it feel not only good, but natural.
The spa has historically been a place where people wind down. It’s present across all cultures as the place where people could turn their minds off for a while before getting back to the workweek. Adjust the brand imagery of general aesthetic and interior of your spa to create a setting of healing and de-stress, you can take people to a place where spending money likely wont matter.
3. The list of 5 most popular trends for beauty & spa logos
Let’s look at the logos of some of the most successful spas, salons, and health and wellness centers in 2020. From the prestigious businesses to the local hits, the expensive designs to DIY ones. This view spans across the world, so you can really get a feel for the brand imagery competitors are using, and realize it’s not so hard! You just need to settle on a consistent theme. Let’s get started:
Beauty & Spa Logo Trend #1:
Many want an abstract ornamental symbol, or lettering. Gold is the most popular, with normally what looks like a metallic gradient running through to make it look like a shiny jewel.
The design will often be drawn in either lacy thin lines, or some blocky lines that make just a few small curves. A fancy gold symbol is a simple fix for many who want to add an air of “luxury”, and a cool holographic effect on business cards for a low overall cost.
Beauty & Spa Logo Trend #2:
Circular shapes are ubiquitous in beauty or cosmetic logo design! It is probably to represent a zen-like completeness a wellness center might give you in body care.
If you want to sell wholesomeness, or a holistic state of health, expand on the basic circle shape. As you can see, companies get pretty creative with it.
Pink Circle Logo by Jani Tavanxhi
Beauty & Spa Logo Trend #3:
A repeating theme is uniquely royal imagery. Whether it’s a crown, or king and queen, or any other type of regalia, many upstarts in the spa world go for this.
Perhaps their angle is that customers are to be treated like royalty at their business, and therefore want these regal images to be at the center of their branding.
Beauty & Spa Logo Trend #4:
Of course, what guide to beauty logos would be complete without flowers and birds. These iconic symbols are spread all over the beauty industry. Small birds in particular show up often, and you can read all about their inclusion in this article here.
Gold Rose Logo by Felipe Moura
The lotus is by far and away the most used flower in spa logos, and the real world examples are almost endless. It naturally grows on the water, and probably has an association with being a very “clean” flower.
Even the authority on everything spas, The Spa Insider, places the lotus front and center as their logo.
Beauty & Spa Logo Trend #5:
A unique thing we’ve noticed in beauty salon logos is that when showing plants they’re very insistent upon showing the stems and branches, where with a regular plant logo you often only see the colorful greenery such as the leaves or grass.
One wonders how this trend came to be, but it has an oddly calming effect as you trace the lines of stems to their origin. It is perhaps a reference to the stem-like plants such as sage and thyme which are often used in spa treatments. Or maybe the roots of one’s hair! Regardless, if your logo evokes emotion, it’s effective.
Tree Branch Logo by Jani Tavanxhi
Branch Logo by Cathy Nordström
4. Some of our unique ideas
There is something very pristine about using an innocent drawing in a spa logo context. It gives a cleansing feeling. Using childish details like crayon-esque strokes and light green colors give a purity to the designs.
It is always worth looking into separating yourself from the crowd by doing your own unique design and branding style. Check out some of these unconventional ideas from successful spas. If you can back up a unique image with quality service, people truly respect and are drawn to your business.
A company emphasizing natural organic ingredients presents a key opportunity to use real or close to realistic images of natural elements such as plants, water, earth. This is not so common in the beauty and spa world, but super effective when its done as its eye catching and often colorful. Think Garnier’s clean leaf logo in a circle. Perhaps you handmake your own soaps for example, and need something to represent yourself. Real images are tangible, and connect the viewer directly to nature.
And lastly lets review the companies who only use a font! Just spelling your name with some nicely designed lettering seems to do just fine for running a profitable spa.
You have stores that have clearly spent a decent amount of money getting their name in a custom designed font, with each letter having its own unique curve and shape. Obviously this looks very prestigious, especially when this unique design is transformed into an aluminum sign to put around the store. However you can always put the custom font on hold and do it once you’ve built up a bit of capital.
Plenty of beauty and spa stores seem to do just fine with a consistent font from the internet, even for free! The minimalist look probably gives an air of prestige about their services.
Even quite amateurishly designed fonts haven’t seemed to stop some spas’ success, as they still pull hundreds of good reviews. As long as they make a special effort to put out quality service they can get away with it.
This article discusses further in depth about using only your name, or what’s referred to as a “logotype”.
The middle ground is representing yourself by one letter, usually designed in some special shape. This cuts the cost of designing the rest of the letters in your name, but you still get one signature letter for your brand that is only yours.
QueGold Letter Logo by Ivan Andelovic
5. Recommendations
At the end of the day the beauty and spa industry comprises largely of local services, and catering to the people in your town or city. Your work will speak for you, as word of mouth spreads, and the quality level of your service will carry profits the furthest. However you cannot get your enterprise off the ground without an image of some kind. Otherwise people will draw a blank when trying to come up with a mental impression of you.
Because cosmetic health and wellness is something people will always seek, your branding image and aesthetic needs to be legitimate enough that customers believe it will happily fulfill their needs. Obviously, as your beauty and spa business gets bigger and adds more complex services to its repertoire such as waxing, massages, or acupuncture, you can add more complexity to your image as well.
As you expand you will realize you need branding across your different products, and even promotional items. You will often be playing with the color, shape, positioning, and background themes of your core logo design in slightly different ways, from the way it will look on the t-shirts employees wear to how it sits on shampoo bottles. This allows you to expand across all of your products while not getting boring or redundant. There is also less pressure to be perfect or decisive here, as it will not be the one and final face of your business.
With a hand selected marketplace of logos you’re getting a guarantee of quality. When both the designs and the designers are curated by a team of accredited designers, you can browse safely knowing they’re up to standard. Any other collections which are not filtered through are a wildcard, and without a trained eye you cannot be sure it will look acceptable let alone great across all products and the front of your store.
We hope you feel better and more confident about selecting your spa design. You don’t have to be the best. You just need to keep up with the competition, while uniquely identifying yourself!
If you are wondering about getting started with printing your beauty salon logo or cosmetic logo on various items, products and different materials, there are some solutions. Zazzle.com will cover a large amount of your needs, pretty much with small items such as business cards or shampoo bottles. There you can customize items you find with your name and designs, offering a great start to beginning businesses.
