Your service menu does more work than any other page you own. It is read by a client on your booking page, repeated by whoever answers the phone, and quoted back to you by someone who thought a half head of foils meant something else. A menu that is written clearly costs you less in explanations and sells more of the services you want to do.
Name services the way clients ask for them
Clients do not ask for a colour service. They ask for a full head of foils, a balayage, a root touch-up, a toner. They ask for a lash fill, not a lash maintenance appointment. If your menu uses your words instead of theirs, every call starts with a translation.
Walk through your last twenty bookings and write down the words the client used. Those are your service names. Where the trade word is the one clients know, keep it. Where it is not, use theirs and put yours in brackets if you must.
One service, one price, one duration
A line that says colour from $120 is a line that generates a phone call. Sometimes that is what you want. Usually it is not. Split the service until each line has a price you can say without a qualifier:
- Half head foils, $150, 2 hours
- Full head foils, $220, 2.5 hours
- Full head foils with toner, $260, 3 hours
The duration matters as much as the price. A client who knows a full set of lashes takes two hours arrives with time, not with a parking meter running out.
For services you really cannot price without seeing the hair, say so in a separate line: colour correction, priced at consultation, consultation $30 redeemable on the service. Now the from price is gone and the consultation has a price of its own.
Put the duration in minutes you actually take
If a cut and blow dry is booked for 45 minutes but takes an hour, your menu is lying to your diary. Time ten of them and use the real number. The menu's durations are what a receptionist, human or otherwise, uses to tell callers how long to allow, and what you use to see whether a request fits a gap.
Order it the way you want to sell it
Menus are read from the top. Put the services you most want to do first within each section, not the cheapest. A barber who wants to sell the fade and beard combination lists it above the plain fade. A lash studio that makes its margin on volume sets lists volume before classic. This is not a trick; it is telling the reader what you are good at.
Group by section with plain headings: Cuts, Colour, Treatments, Brows and Lashes, Waxing. Keep the sections short enough that someone can scan them in a glance.
Cut the services you never do
Every line is a line you have to price, keep current and be able to explain. If you have not done a service in six months, take it off. A shorter menu with every line current beats a long menu with three stale prices on it. If someone asks for the thing you removed, you can still do it, and you can price it then.
Write the price without decoration
$95, not $95.00 and not from $95 and not $95*. If a price depends on something, make the thing a separate line. If children are cheaper, write kids' cut (under 12), $25. The asterisk that points to a footnote is the sound of a client working out whether they have been misled.
Keep the words short
A service name of more than six or seven words will be read badly on a phone screen and spoken badly on the phone. Women's cut and blow dry, not a precision cut tailored to your face shape with a finishing blow dry. The second one is a sentence for your website's about page, if anywhere.
Read it aloud
Before you publish, read the whole menu aloud as if to a caller. Any line that makes you add a word to explain it needs that word in the line. Any line you stumble over needs to be shorter. This is the test that matters, because if you use a receptionist line it will read your menu exactly as written, and a line that is awkward for you will be awkward for it.
Review it every quarter
Product costs move, your speed changes, a new service arrives. Put a note in the calendar for the first week of each quarter: read the menu, fix the prices, retire the dead lines. If your menu lives in one place that feeds your booking page and your phone line, as it does on Glow Line's Receptionist page, that is one edit, and the next call hears the new price.
A good menu is not a brochure. It is the set of things you are happy to be asked for, each with a price and a time you can stand behind.