Godrej Professional launches Suraksha Salon Program to help reopening salons

Lockdown 4.0 has brought some form of reprieve to business owners, in particular, the ones whose base of operations lies in the Orange and Green zones.

One of these businesses that have begun to reopen is salons. People, after all, will need to visit them to get their haircuts and massages and everything else they need to feel fresh and rejuvenated; two months locked inside homes does not bode well for hair grooming.

However, the point of concern here lies in the visit to a salon. People will remain cautious because they fear the risk of infection considering how close people get inside a salon. This concern is felt on both sides – customers and stylists.

To address this concern, Godrej Professional, a professional brand with products in hair colour, care, styling and keratin from Godrej Consumer Products Limited (GCPL) has announced the Suraksha Salon Program, to support the Indian salon industry.

This program has three pillars:

1. Free distribution and subsidized sanitizer and disposable kits cost for salons

2. Education on safety and hygiene for salon infrastructure and services

3. Back-to-business support

All of these initiatives are available free of cost to any salon that requires support and is not restricted to those that use Godrej Professional.

Under this program, the hair care professional brand is also taking steps to help the Indian salon industry:

1. Donate 15,000 litres of sanitizers and 10,000 re-usable masks for the well-being of the stylists.

2. Support salons with sanitizer & disposable kits for salon safety in a non-profit manner. ( It has partnered with vendors making such disposable items to provide salons easy accessibility at a highly subsidized price.)

3. The Suraksha Salon program will continue to provide all salons with sanitizers and these disposable kits at subsidized cost until the outbreak of the virus is contained.

This initiative is expected to support more than 10,000 salons.

Also, the hair care major has developed curated ‘Suraksha Guidelines’, a comprehensive module on safety and hygiene. It covers all aspects of salon sanitization, employee safety, client safety, and hair services, to skin and make-up services and it is available in English, Hindi, and seven regional languages so that stylists from any part of India can understand the guidelines.

To ensure stylists imbibe the guidelines, Godrej also offers certified training courses online free of cost and open to anyone from the salon community.

A few days ago, L’Oréal India developed a support guide for salons. Called the ‘Back to Business’ safety guidelines, L’Oréal India will distribute it to its 45,000-strong salon network and over 170,000 hairdressers across the country.