Your barbershop's price list,
always current

The window is your number-one source of clients. A barbershop is a street business: half the clients come in because they were passing. A bright screen with a flawless fade and clear prices captures more than any printed sign, and it works on Sunday when you are closed too, with your Instagram and Monday's opening time.

«Short on the sides» means five different things, and you find out ten minutes in. By then the clippers have already been through, and whatever he pictured is no longer available. There is no argument, just a man who says it is fine and does not book again. The whole problem is that a haircut is described in words by someone who does not have the words for it. A photo settles it before the cape goes on: he points, you nod, and you are both looking at the same head. Thirty seconds that remove the only complaint a barbershop genuinely cannot fix afterwards.

High-margin product sells itself at the mirror. Beard oil, pomade, clay: high margins the barber has no time to offer. The screen above the mirror does it for them, at the exact moment the client sees the result and thinks "how do I keep this at home?".

To be straight with you: we do not manage bookings. If you use Booksy, Treatwell or Fresha for appointments, you carry on with them; the walk-in queue is ours, taken with a QR code, and it does not talk to your booking app. We are the screen layer that captures, shows and sells, not a booking system.

Most shops solve this by flattening it, and flattening it costs them. One board, one price, no names — which is tidy, and which quietly throws away the only thing that makes a barbershop hard to replace. Nobody has a favourite shop. They have a favourite barber, they book around his days off, and they will follow him across the road without hesitating. Pretending otherwise on the wall does not make it less true; it just means the customer has to ask at the counter what he could have read from the pavement.

So the honest version is a wall of chairs, not a wall of services. Name, face, the days they work, what they charge, what they are best at, and whether there is a gap this afternoon. It reads as confidence rather than admin, it answers the question the passer-by is actually asking — «can I get in, with someone good, now» — and it takes the awkward pricing conversation off the till, where it always lands on whoever happens to be nearest.

There is a real tension underneath and it is worth naming rather than pretending it away. Putting a barber's name on the window builds his following as much as the shop's, and an owner can reasonably wonder whether that is wise. It is — because the alternative is not a shop with anonymous chairs, it is a shop whose customers still know exactly whose chair they sit in and simply cannot plan around it. What holds people is being able to book the person they want; what loses them is turning up and finding he is off on Tuesdays.

And whichever way the shop is set up, get the arrangement itself right before it shows up on a wall. Whether someone renting a chair is genuinely self-employed is not settled by calling it chair rent, and the sector has had that tested more than once — who sets the prices, who owns the diary, who decides the hours. A window that lists four barbers with four price lists is a public statement about how the business works, and it should be one that matches the paperwork.

To be straight with you: we display what you upload and we take no view on how your shop is arranged. Employment status, VAT and what your agreements should say are questions for your accountant — the point here is only that a rent-a-chair shop and a shop with employees need different things on the wall, and almost every window is written as though there were only one kind.

The bench is the queue, and it’s full. Lads stand in the doorway, someone nips to the cashpoint and comes back to find two new faces claiming they were first, and the barber ends up refereeing with clippers in hand.

A QR code on the door makes the order official. Customers scan it, hit “Take a number”, and can wait in the pub next door or sit in the car: their mobile says how many cuts are before them and, once you’ve done a few, roughly how long, judged by your real speed in the chair. When you finish a fade, tap “Next” on your phone; the TV over the bench shows “B-008 → Chair 2” with a ding-dong, and the customer’s handset buzzes if the page is open. With two or three barbers on one queue, each chair calls for itself and the screen lists them all. Older regulars without a smartphone? Give them a number yourself. How the QR queue works.

Booked clients don’t join it. Keep your Booksy appointments as they are and use the queue only for walk-ins.

To be straight with you: if he locks his phone in the pub, it won’t buzz — he needs the page open. And the wait estimate only shows up after a handful of cuts; until then, there’s no figure.