Sola Salons 2026 FDD Savings: How Data-Driven Adaptation Has Cut Costs for Franchisees

Sola Salons, the leading salon suites franchise with over 750 units nationwide, has proven its strength as a business model with high potential for return on investment and clear scalability. And with the release of its new 2025 Franchise Disclosure Document, the opportunity is now even more accessible. In the 2024 FDD, the estimated initial investment required to open a Sola Salons business ranged from $924,021 to $1,957,824. In 2025, that range is $1,181,960 to $1,939,349, lowering the estimated top-end of the investment by nearly $20,000. Within this range, there are a few key components the team has focused on to reduce costs and encourage franchisees to spend even more strategically.

“We’ve really redefined what our refresh and rebrand looks like, and that has impacted our process of determining costs,” said Ashley Chatley, vice president of design and construction at Radiance Holdings. “When we think about the five and 10-year remodels and the costs associated with those, we also like to think about what that will look like and what kind of best practices we can build into the initial design and construction to support success later on.”

With new guidelines surrounding what to do and how much money each action item will cost, Sola has organized and published an entirely new manual from a design and checklist standpoint.

This impacts several expenses in the 2026 FDD:

“We still look at the layouts strategically, and we’re really starting to push a fixture plan,” Chatley said. “We work to understand what is driving each studio’s leasing. So if the key driver is hair, do we need so much millwork? If we’re getting a mix of aestheticians and massage therapists, do we really need every room to be fully fixtured as if it was a hair salon? When we tie more data into the build-out process, we don’t have franchisees buying $250,000 worth of fixtures then only utilizing a quarter of it at the opening point.”

By surveying franchisees about their first opening process, the team has developed what Chatley describes as a scaled-back version of the fixture program. That way, new franchisees can launch with a “light” version of the build-out and begin to add more resources after they are drawing in funds and building momentum.

“That’s never been done,” Chatley said. “Previously, we laid out the plan that had always worked and said, ‘Here’s what we do.’ Now, we’re getting multiple types of users, and we want to incentivize franchisees to not spend so much money up front if they don’t need to.”

That shift in mindset opened the door for a more flexible, responsive support model tailored to each franchisee’s unique launch conditions.

“We had an opportunity to reevaluate how we’ve always done it,” Chatley said. “We thought, ‘Are we doing it the right way? How do we do it?’ And we had an opportunity to fix that process a bit to provide the franchisees with what they absolutely needed and allow them to scale strategically as the business got off the ground.”

To find out more information on costs to buy this franchise, please visit https://1851franchise.com/sola-salons.