SmartCut: Where Men Can Sit Back, Relax, & Feel Pampered
Who doesn’t like being pampered? And who said men don’t need to look good? SmartCut is here to change the way you feel about yourself, and they are focusing on the neglected sector of men’s grooming.
We at LumenSoft, like to get to know our customers and listen to their stories. Since SmartCut uses Candela retail software to manage their salon chain, we recently caught up with their marketing director, Mohsin Akram & Mohammad Awais (the IT manager), at the Samrtcut head office to discuss how and why they decided to focus on the service sector of men’s grooming.
Located on the main Link road, the SmartCut head office is the place where all the planning and brainstorming happens. It’s a quiet place but there is nothing quiet about the waves it is making in the men’s salon business.
The LumenSoft team in between thinking about the kind of facial they need and admiring the contagious enthusiasm of the SmartCut team, had a chat with Mohammad Awais (the IT manager at SmartCut) & Mohsin Akram (marketing director)
How Did it All Start?
The Smart Cut CEO, Farman Akram, is a challenge seeker. After having worked with a major fashion apparel brand for 5 years, he decided to branch out into uncharted waters. In just five years, his passion and vision have established SmartCut as a major local brand offering men’s salon services in five cities in Pakistan.
Why Especially Men’s Salon?
Our CEO has always been big on doing something for the country, to add some value. He decided to focus on the neglected sector of men’s salons. His idea was to establish a brand of international standard that would not just create a name for Pakistan in this sector but also generate maximum employment opportunities. Before SmartCut, nobody had considered establishing this service as a brand.
What Makes You Stand out? Why Should Someone Visit SmartCut?
SmartCut is aware of the need to provide economical services so that a maximum number of people can benefit from them. Our specialty is to make prestigious high-end salon services affordable. We neither compromise on the product quality nor on the standards of our services and interior. We use good quality products from international brands and purchase all our products directly from the companies.
Let’s Talk About the Current Trends.
As for the trends, if you look at the fashion industry cycle, it repeats itself. For example, a hairstyle considered fashionable a decade ago can resurface as a new trend. It is human nature to crave variety and change, so outdated fashions can become hip after some time, and the current styles can become outdated to resurface as new later on. It is a cycle.
However, innovations and advances keep happening in the field of services like skin care. We closely follow the latest advancements in skin care technology to be able to offer the benefits of such advancements to our customers. Hydra energy is the latest technology, and currently, we are offering hydra facial, hydra energy-based facials to our clients.
Do You Aalso Give Grooming or Fashion Consultancy?
Yes, we do. With the rise of social media and platforms like tick-tock, our youngers have become quite conscious about personal grooming. Everyone wants to look like a model, so we align styling and treatments accordingly.
However, it is important to choose the right hairstyle according to our face shape; we always guide our customers about the most flattering hairstyle for their face shape. The same goes for hair treatments. Hair types are different and all hair treatments need to take this into account. For example, there are certain hair types for which we don’t recommend keratin treatment, and for some other types, we don’t recommend straightening, etc.
Similarly, we recommend skin treatments according to the skin type. If you have dry skin you need a certain type of treatment, oil skin would require a totally different type of facial or treatment. We provide full consultancy about the finer details of such skincare therapies.
Why the Name SmartCut?
Well, selecting a name wasn’t a long-drawn process. Our CEO had a kind of intuition that ‘SmartCut’ should be the name and that’s it.
What’s Next for SmartCut?
We want to get in front of a wider audience, and for this, we have both short and long-term goals By 2025, we intend to open 15 more branches in different cities in Pakistan. We are also highly aware of the need to train world-class stylists who can compete internationally. For this purpose, we have our own academy where we train our staff. In the academy, we don’t just train them in the required skills but also work on their education and grooming.
We are also investing in new technologies to keep our fingers on the pulse of the industry.
What Message Does SmartCut Want to Give?
Our CEO is our motivation, and his energy and vision have helped define our vision. Our message is what we have learned from him: instead of following the well-beaten path, we should trust in our dreams and explore uncharted waters. We believed in the idea of SmartCut, we believed it could be a brand. And today our dream is a reality. Big names from the show biz industry are our brand ambassadors. Especially, the veteran actor Nauman Ejaz has played a big role in spreading our brand message.
