We would like to start by thanking you all for a few things, your unwavering support during our service closure (seriously - we have the BEST clients), your excitement for us when the province announced that salons could begin to re-open as of May 4th, your patience when we told you that we would not be re-opening on May 4th and now for your understanding when we explain why and introduce the following protocols that we will be implementing upon our re-opening.
We don't expect any of you to understand without our explaining to you how trying this time has been. On March 18th, we laid off our staff, closed our doors and flicked a switch to turn off our personal and business income, without knowing what lay ahead (we closed voluntarily, 2 weeks before being mandated to because it was what we believed was the right thing to do).
We could not be more proud of the choice we made, we truly believe it was in part, this small business community that voluntarily shut their doors, risking everything, for the greater good of our community, that has had an integral role in the flattening of the curve in Manitoba. Of course, many other factors have also contributed and right now we could not be more proud to be Manitoban!
We immediately shifted our business model to a whole new one and thanks to your support, we have thrived (relatively speaking) during our service closure, this we will be eternally grateful to you for. We never had any time "off" during this closure, in fact we've never worked so hard, working 24/7 similar to when we first opened our business, but with much more uncertainty as to what lay ahead.
The province's announcement to slowly re-open the economy on May 4th is such great news. Salons and Barbershops have been included in Phase 1, meaning we will be re-opening our salon very soon. But as you can imagine, we need time, to get the proper personal protective equipment, to re-hire our employees, to sanitize our space, order our inventory, implement new polices, etc... so for all of those reasons, we have chosen to re-open on Tuesday May 19th.
We completely understand that you're shaggy, have roots you'd hoped no one would EVER see and likely were hoping we'd re-open sooner. But the reality is that, we're not re-opening normally. Because of the size of our salon and in order to adhere to the government guidelines for salons, we will only be able to function at less than 25% of what we once did on the service side of our business, unfortunately it seems we are a long way away from "business as usual".
The following newsletter outlines the "new" Alise Frederic Salon for the time being, we remain hopeful that by the time Phase 2 is implemented that we may be able to ease up on some of these restrictions and function at a higher level. We encourage you to read through all of the information provided if you are hoping to be seen for an appointment in the next 2 months. We have received a very high volume of calls, texts and emails and this is the easiest way for us to get the information across to everyone at the same time.
Your stylist will be in touch in the coming weeks to get you re-booked if you had an appointment cancelled by us due to COVID-19. If you cancelled (meaning we no longer have your appointment in our book), please email us (if you haven't already) and we will add you to our list. We will confirm that your cancelled appointment is in our audit log before we will re-book you. We appreciate your patience in waiting for us to get back to you. We've seen your message and we'll get there. We have hundreds of appointments to figure out and 75% less room to put them into our schedules than we did before.
We also truly appreciate every single message of support and encouragement for the tough job that we have ahead of us with re-opening, your support means the world to us.
