MY SALON Suite Parent Hits 100th Location With Richmond Opening

National Salon Suite, the parent company behind MY SALON Suite and Salon Plaza, has opened its 100th location in Richmond — a milestone that marks how far the suite-rental model has travelled from niche experiment to mainstream career path for stylists.

Salon Today reported the opening, which lands the two brands at a combined hundred sites. For independent stylists weighing a booth-rental arrangement against traditional commission work, a footprint of that size changes the calculus: a hundred-location network means more markets where a stylist can rent a fully built suite without financing a build-out alone.

What does 100 locations actually signal?

The suite model sits between employment and full salon ownership. A stylist rents a private, equipped suite from an operator like MY SALON Suite or Salon Plaza, keeps their service revenue, and runs their own book — while the operator carries the property costs, the equipment and the common-area overhead.

Reaching a hundred locations tells working professionals two things. First, demand from stylists who want independence without a commercial lease has stayed strong enough to keep the expansion going. Second, landlords and franchise investors still see beauty real estate as a dependable category, which keeps new suites coming to more metros — including Richmond.

For a stylist in or around Richmond, the practical takeaway is simple: there is now another fully optioned place to practice, with the brands' established suite infrastructure behind it. For salon owners in the same market, it means one more competitor for experienced staff who fancy going solo.

Why salon owners should care

Every new suite location is also a recruiting pressure point. When a stylist can walk into a turnkey suite, keep their pricing and set their own hours, the pitch you make to retain top earners has to be sharper — better commission splits, education, product support, or a genuine career ladder.

The hundred-site milestone also reflects where client behaviour has gone. Consumers have grown comfortable booking directly with individual stylists, and the suite model is built entirely around that relationship. Owners who still rely on the salon's brand, rather than the stylist's, to drive bookings are competing with a model that inverts it.

The steady climb of the suite segment

Expansion stories like this one rarely happen in a straight line, but the direction here has been consistent: more locations, more markets, more operators following the same playbook. A hundred doors under one parent company means the model has cleared the proof-of-concept stage several times over.

For stylists, that maturity translates into choice — more suites, in more cities, with standardised fit-outs they can compare on price and terms rather than on guesswork. For the wider trade, it confirms that the independent-stylist segment is no longer a side note to the commission salon economy.

Watch the next announcement from National Salon Suite closely: the pace at which locations 101 and beyond follow Richmond will tell you how much runway the suite model still has.