Trade counter, back bar and colour
We sell to the chair, not to the person in it.
A professional supply house is not a shop with better prices. It carries lines that are only sold to licence holders, it sells in back-bar sizes nobody would buy for a bathroom, and the thing it actually competes on is whether somebody at the counter can answer the phone at eight in the morning when the colour has gone wrong and there is a client in the chair.
Who buys here
Licensed cosmetologists, barbers, estheticians and nail technicians. Salon and barbershop owners buying for a back bar. Booth renters buying for one chair, on the same price list as a ten chair salon.
What that gets you
Professional colour and lightener lines, litre and gallon developer, back-bar sizes, tools, and a counter that will talk you through a correction rather than sell you another bottle.
Who does not
The public, and that is not a posture. Diverted professional colour applied without training is the single largest source of the corrections on this page, and selling it to somebody unlicensed just moves the problem into a salon later.
The wall everybody walks past
Four numbers on four shelves, and they are not interchangeable.
Developer is sold by volume, which is a measure of how much oxygen the peroxide can release. That number decides how far the hair lifts, how hard the cuticle is worked, and how long you have. It is the most consequential choice in the colour room and the one most often made by reaching for whatever the last stylist left open.
| Volume | Lift | What it is actually for | What goes wrong with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | None | Depositing colour and toning. Refreshing ends. Anywhere you want the pigment to go in without opening the hair up. | Reached for when grey coverage was wanted. Ten will not open the cuticle enough to hold on resistant grey, and it looks fine wet and rinses out by the third wash. |
| 20 | About one level | Grey coverage and most single-process work. The default for a reason: it is enough to open the hair and not enough to run away from you. | Used at the roots on a retouch and then dragged through mid-lengths, which is where banding comes from. |
| 30 | About two levels | Lift with a tone in one step. Highlights where the starting level is already reasonably light. | Left to process on the assumption it behaves like twenty. It does not, and the ten minutes you spent at the front desk is where the damage happened. |
| 40 | About three levels | Off-scalp lightening only, in foil or a balayage, by somebody watching it. | Used on scalp. This is the single most common cause of a chemical burn in a salon and there is no colour result that justifies it. |
One Tuesday at the counter
Five calls, and what we said back.
This is the part of the business that does not appear on an invoice. The prices here are the same prices as everywhere else within about four percent, so the reason to buy from a counter rather than a website is the twenty minutes below. The questions are typical of the trade rather than transcribed from any real call.
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8:12 am Hot roots
“I did a retouch, twenty volume, same formula I always use. She's out of the bowl and the roots are two shades brighter than everything else. She's still in the chair.”
What the counter said
The scalp is a radiator and fresh regrowth has no previous colour in it, so the same formula processes faster and lifts further at the root than it does an inch down. That is not a formula fault, it is a heat and porosity difference, and it happens most on a warm morning in a warm room.
Do not re-colour the roots darker on top of it. Bring the mid-lengths and ends up to meet the root with a filler-appropriate deposit at ten volume, and next time formulate the root a half level deeper than the target and apply it second, after the mid-lengths have had five minutes.
What she needed from us A litre of 10 volume, which she already had, and nothing else. No sale on that call. -
10:40 am Brassy after three washes
“Third client this month. Beautiful cool blonde when she leaves, orange by the weekend. I'm toning. Am I buying the wrong toner?”
What the counter said
Probably not the toner. A toner deposits a small amount of pigment to cancel what is underneath it, and if the hair was not lifted far enough the pigment underneath is orange rather than yellow. Violet cancels yellow. Blue cancels orange. A violet toner on an orange base is being asked to do a job it is the wrong colour for, and it washes out in three shampoos because there was never enough of it to hold the correction.
Look at the base before the toner goes on, in daylight, wet. If it is orange, that is a lifting conversation, not a toning one, and no purple shampoo sent home will fix it either.
What she needed from us A blue-based toner she did not have on the shelf, and a swatch ring so the base gets judged against something rather than by eye. -
1:05 pm Banding
“Three visible bands. You can see every appointment she's ever had. Where do I even start.”
What the counter said
Every band is one overlap. Lightener applied over hair that was already lightened at a previous appointment goes further than the virgin hair beside it, so the boundary between the two sits there permanently as a line. Three bands is three retouches where the application crossed the old line by a quarter inch.
The fix is slow and it is mechanical rather than chemical: work the bands individually rather than the whole head, section finer than feels necessary, and accept two appointments. Anything that promises to do it in one is going to take the length off instead.
What she needed from us A bond-building additive, finer sectioning clips, and permission to tell the client it is two appointments. The last one was the actual reason for the call. -
2:50 pm Undisclosed box colour
“She's told me twice she's never coloured it. It does not look like hair that's never been coloured. What do I do.”
What the counter said
Take a strand from an inconspicuous section and test it before anything else happens, in a bowl, away from the client's head. Some home colour contains metallic salts, and lightener on top of those can react in a way that gets hot and smells of sulphur and takes the strand off in your fingers. You want that happening in a bowl.
If the strand fails, the service does not happen today, and the sentence to use is that the hair needs to grow out or be cut, not that the client lied. She may genuinely not know what was in the box, and she may not think a rinse from four months ago counts.
What she needed from us Nothing. This is the call we would rather take than the one after. -
4:30 pm Lightener stalled
“It's stopped at about a seven. Still orange. There's a wedding Saturday. Can I put a fresh bowl over the top?”
What the counter said
No. Lightener exhausts: once the peroxide has released its oxygen the mixture keeps sitting there doing nothing but swelling the hair, and a second application over the same still-wet application is the classic route to hair that comes off in the basin. The stall is information, and the information is that this head needed a stronger developer or a different starting point.
Rinse, treat, tone to something that works at a seven, and book the second session. A gold-toned seven at a wedding is a fine outcome. The other version of Saturday is a haircut.
What she needed from us A protein-balanced treatment and a warm-neutral toner, collected at the counter at ten past five because we do not close until six.
Opening an account
Four steps, and the first one is a licence.
- Bring your licenceCurrent Missouri or Kansas cosmetology, barber, esthetician or nail technician licence. We take the number, check it against the state's own lookup, and note the expiry. When it lapses the account pauses rather than quietly keeps selling.
- Tell us how many chairsNot because pricing changes with volume, it does not, but because a one chair booth renter and an eight chair salon need different case sizes and there is no point shipping either the wrong one.
- Choose a delivery day or don'tNorthland runs Tuesday and Friday. Counter pickup is any day we are open, and there is no minimum on a pickup. Delivery has one, and it is stated on the account sheet rather than discovered.
- Terms after ninety daysEverybody starts on card or cash. Net fifteen is available after three months of trading, on request, and it is not offered automatically because a new salon carrying stock on terms in its first quarter is a bad idea we would rather not sell you.
- Counter
- 1912 Swift Avenue
North Kansas City, Missouri 64116
Dock and customer parking off Swift - Hours
- Monday to Friday, 7:30am to 6pm
Saturday, 8am to 2pm
The early hour is deliberate. Colour problems happen before nine. - Telephone
- (816) 555-0159
A licensed colourist is on the counter every day until 4pm. - What we will not sell you
- Professional colour or lightener without a current licence on file, 40 volume to somebody who has described a scalp application, or a fourth bottle of toner when the answer is that the hair was not lifted far enough.
Come and look at the shelf
It is a warehouse with a counter in it, and that is the point.
There is no display, no testers and no lighting design. What there is, is depth: enough of each line that a Tuesday emergency is on the shelf rather than on a truck, and somebody at the front who has stood behind a chair.