Beauty
Great Clips Franchise
A walk-in hair salon franchise offering a limited menu of haircare services without appointments, built almost entirely on independent ownership. Opened its first salon in Minneapolis in 1982 and has franchised since 1983; unlike most other haircare chains in this dataset, Great Clips operates zero company-owned salons.
Every franchisor has to file a document called an FDD before they can legally sell you a franchise. Buried in it are the two things a sales rep won't volunteer: what you'll actually spend to open, and whether existing locations are opening or closing. That's what's below, pulled straight from Great Clips's own filing.
What it costs to open
From the filing's investment breakdown -- not a "starting at" number a sales rep quoted you.
Franchise fee
$20,000
Total to open
$183,400–$394,400
Ongoing royalty
6% of gross sales
What you'd actually spend, over time
The upfront cost is only part of it. Plug in what you expect a location to bring in, and see the real total once royalties over a few years are added on top.
Defaulted to a rough beauty industry average, not a figure from Great Clips's own FDD -- change it to your own estimate.
Total cost of ownership over 5 years
$333,400 – $544,400
Startup investment
$183,400–$394,400
Royalty per year (6%)
$30,000
Total royalty, 5yr
$150,000
When would you break even?
Revenue alone doesn't tell you this -- it depends on what's left after rent, labor, and everything else. Great Clips's FDD doesn't disclose a reliable profit figure (most franchisors don't), so this starts from a typical beauty profit margin (~10%) and applies it to the revenue you entered above -- adjust the percentage to your own realistic estimate.
Defaulted to a general beauty industry benchmark, not a figure from Great Clips's own filing -- this is a starting point to adjust, not a promise about what franchisees actually make.
At that profit, you'd break even in about
3.7–7.9 years
Weigh that payback period against what you already know: Great Clips is currently losing locations. A long payback period on a shrinking brand is a very different bet than the same payback period on a growing one.
Is Great Clips actually growing?
Franchisors have to report, every year, how many locations opened, closed, or changed hands. Most franchise sites never show you this. Here it is:
Locations opened vs. closed, by year
ShrinkingFrom Item 20 of Great Clips's FDD, the section franchisors use to disclose real openings and closings.
| Year | Franchised units, start | Franchised units, end | Net change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 4,473 | 4,472 | -1 |
| 2021 | 4,472 | 4,447 | -25 |
| 2022 | 4,447 | 4,427 | -20 |
Most recent year (2022): lost 20 franchised units, ending the year at 4,427 total.
How Great Clips compares to other Beauty franchises
Across the 4 beauty franchises we've hand-verified so far, the typical range to open runs $363,927–$562,217, with royalties averaging around 6% of gross sales (based on the 4 of them that charge a flat %-of-revenue royalty). That's still a small sample -- treat it as a rough starting point, not an industry-wide benchmark.
Keep going
- Great Clips and Supercuts are both beauty franchises; Great Clips's total investment starts about $2,530 lower than Supercuts's. Supercuts Franchise
- Great Clips and Amazing Lash Studio are both beauty franchises; Great Clips's total investment starts about $301,284 lower than Amazing Lash Studio's. Amazing Lash Studio Franchise
Where this came from: California DFPI Registration Renewal, App ID app-27098, filed 3/30/2023, effective 11/6/2024. FDD issued March 30, 2023 -- an older filing; Item 20's three-year window here covers 2020-2022, not 2023-2025 like most other entries in this dataset. The underlying PDF also uses a non-standard font encoding that breaks plain-text extraction on much of the body text (letters, not digits, get substituted); the figures below were read directly off the readable portions and cross-checked against the PDF. Item 5: $20,000 initial franchise fee for a single salon ($35,000 under the Three Star lease-signing incentive program covering three salons; $10,000 per salon under a Master Development Agreement). Item 6: 6% continuing franchise (royalty) fee and 5% continuing advertising contribution to the Ad Fund, both of Gross Sales, billed biweekly. Item 7: $183,400-$394,400 total initial investment for a single salon (Note 12). Item 20 Table 1 franchised outlets; company-owned outlets were zero throughout the window. You can pull the same filing yourself from the California DFPI's public franchise search. Filed 2023-03-30. None of this is investment advice -- get the franchisor's current FDD and talk to a real attorney or accountant before you sign anything.
If you see a different unit count elsewhere: franchisors only have to refile their FDD annually, so the numbers here can run 6–18 months behind a franchisor's own real-time marketing claims -- which often aren't independently verified, and sometimes count signed-but-not-yet-open locations. A gap isn't necessarily an error on either side; it's two different snapshots in time from two different sources.