Aaina
One of the oldest South Asian salons in Scotland.
How it started
Aaina is one of the oldest South Asian salons in Scotland, and my family's business. It has built its reputation over nearly thirty years entirely on the quality of the work and the warmth of the space.
Recently, my family asked how they should invest in marketing. The honest answer was that the marketing wasn't the problem. There was no proper website to send anyone to, no way to track what worked, and no visibility on the numbers at all. Paid ads would have made noise, not results.
So we built the infrastructure instead, in the order that made things better fastest. That work is still going.
A website that does the salon justice
Aaina's old site was four thin pages. It named the business and listed a phone number, and that was close to the whole of it. Meanwhile every real question a customer had was answered by phoning the salon and interrupting someone mid-appointment.
The rebuild answers those questions instead. Fifty pages: every treatment on its own page, the full price list with times and prices, bridal packages, twelve written guides, the salon's story, the jewellery side of the business.
The service wall and the full price list. Every price is stored once and feeds every page it appears on.
Content that finally travels
The first video we filmed together did nearly nineteen thousand views, on an account whose videos had been averaging around a thousand. That set the brief.
We've been posting every week for the last couple of months, and still are. Twenty-three videos since March have done a shade over 107,000 views between them, averaging roughly 4,700 each against the previous year's 1,100. The two best-performing videos in the account's history both came out of this run.
None of it is polished production. It works because it's filmed in the salon, by the people who work there, about things their customers actually care about.
The books, rebuilt as software
Aaina's takings lived in a paper sales book. Every month meant hours of typing figures into a spreadsheet, and even then the numbers only told you the total.
So I built the salon its own bookkeeping app. She photographs the day's page on her phone, and the treatments, prices, staff and payment types are read off the handwriting, checked, and saved. She reckons it saves her about six hours a week.
The part she didn't ask for is the part she uses most: revenue by treatment, the busiest day of the week, this period against the last. Her previous software showed her none of it.
The brand underneath all of it
None of it would have held together without fixing the foundations first. Aaina had decades of patchwork branding, different fonts and colours from different eras with nothing tying them together.
A palette, typography and a set of graphic patterns now run across everything, from the price list to the website to the event posters. The Durga Pooja poster is the clearest example: built around the concept of Shakti rather than as a generic seasonal promotion, which is why it got shared.
Key outcomes
TikTok views in five months
Average views per video
Pages on the new site, up from 4
A week off the books
Tools used
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