Pandemic breathes new life into house calls
In the middle of May, Ashley Barton sipped a mimosa in her best friend’s apartment in Queens while she enjoyed her first professional manicure and pedicure since New York City ordered residents to stay home to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The in-house experience, with candles burning and soft music playing, was a game-changer. Before the pandemic, Barton, a 33year-old publicist, would drive from her Queens apartment to a salon near her parents’ house on Long Island to get a mani-pedi. But not anymore.
“There is something about the comfort of doing this in your own home, to have someone holding your foot like it is the most amazing thing,” Barton said. “I won’t forget when I heard the clippers come out. It sounded like someone was popping bottles of Dom Pérignon.”
Barton has become a regular client of Green Spa on the Go, a manicurist that offers in-home manicures and pedicures that range from $140 to $300, depending on the location. Barton now gets them done with her parents at their home every two weeks.
“I’m not ready to sit in a nail salon, even with this protective gear,” she said. “I’d rather just be in my parents’ backyard doing my nails and toes. I can control the environment.”
As the country undergoes a Sisyphean-seeming reopening, many Americans are still wary of venturing out. To accommodate skittish clients who have neglected their basic grooming for months, a cadre of service providers — personal trainers, hairstylists, tattoo artists, pet
groomers and spiritual advisers — have been making house calls. They have been fielding calls from clients eager to receive services in their living rooms and yards or even on their balconies.
For providers who always had an in-home component to their business, this period of seclusion has proved to be a boon, giving them an edge in an anxious time. They’ve attracted new clients who never considered house calls before but have since discovered that they like private pampering.
“We believe this is a long-term shift in consumer behavior,” said Amy Shecter, chief executive of Glamsquad, an in-home beauty company with headquarters in New York City that offers services like blowouts, manicures, pedicures and makeup application.
Glamsquad has resumed its usual services. Workers undergo safety training to reduce the chance of coronavirus transmission and
wear personal protective equipment during visits.
“This is our moment,” Schecter said. “People are going to shift to doing this service in-home, and they’re going to shift to providers like us.”
Marianella Aguirre, founder of Green Spa on the Go, which specializes in house calls in New York, Connecticut and the Hamptons, also sees her business model as one that could thrive in the current environment, with anxious clients worried about crowded nail salons.
“It’s incredible,” she said. “It’s like we were set up for this.”
Before the pandemic, Aguirre received about five calls a week from new clients. Now she gets that many a day. Nearly all of them request that the service be provided in a backyard. “They are desperate, and they don’t want to wait anymore,” she said.
At-home services have always been a niche offering, and there is no data to
track whether the industry has grown during statemandated stay-at-home orders, as such services that occurred during that time would most likely have been clandestine.
But interest does not appear to be limited to the beauty industry. At Groomit, which provides in-house pet grooming services in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, business is up 30% since the company started offering services again, according to a founder, Sohel Kapadia. “Even though half of New York City is empty,” Kapadia said, referring to the residents who fled the city as it shut down, “the new customers are making up for the losses of the old customers.”
After months spent huddling at home, many Americans feel safer on their sofas than they do almost anywhere else. But a living room is not necessarily a safer location for a blowout than a salon is. With good ventilation,
adequate physical distancing and enough personal protective equipment, a salon may actually be less risky than a small, cramped apartment, even if more people pass through the salon.
“We still don’t know that much about transmission, even though we’re bombarded with information about what we do know,” said Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. “Is it safer to have more people in a space, but in a space that is bigger and has better ventilation and has better masking? We can’t really quantify what the differences are.”
Joey Chavez, a tattoo artist in Corona, California, was able to reopen his tattoo parlor, Trusted Tattoo, in June, but he had been offering services out of a mobile tattoo bus, the Body Art Bus, which he would drive to clients’ homes in the weeks before the shop reopened. He sanitized the vehicle between clients, used disposable equipment and limited the number of people in the space to only himself and his client.
“It is a lot safer for us to come to their homes,” said Chavez, who charges $250 for the service on top of the $150-per-hour fee for a tattoo. “We bring a fully disinfectable mobile tattoo parlor.”
On June 27, Chavez had to shut down Trusted Tattoo and the bus for two weeks after a client tested positive for COVID-19 soon after a Body Art Bus tattoo session. Chavez and another tattoo artist who had been on the bus quarantined for two weeks. Chavez reopened his businesses last week, only for local health department officials to shut them down almost immediately as the state tightened its quarantine restrictions.
“It’s impossible to plan,” Chavez said. “I had to cancel 14 days of clients. It makes it hard to do anything.”
But for those who can receive them, house calls can be a salve during a difficult time. In May, clients started calling Nini Grace, a spiritual life coach and medium in Avon-bythe-Sea, New Jersey, requesting house calls. By June, she had begun visiting clients in their homes again, holding sessions mostly in people’s backyards and charging $90 per person for the visits. Her business has tripled, she said, and she’s now booked through October for home visits.
Grace wears a mask when she greets the clients, but once everyone is settled outdoors and at a safe distance, she usually removes it to start the session.
“This is such a desperate time with so many unknowns for folks,” she said. “They just needed some comfort.”