The company behind your $16 haircut barely runs a salon
The company that quietly cuts millions of heads of hair a year runs almost no salons of its own. Here is how a 100-year-old chain rebuilt itself around franchisees, royalties and the corner-strip haircut.
Drive past a strip mall in almost any American town and you will pass one of its salons - a Supercuts between the phone store and the sub shop, a Cost Cutters near the grocery anchor, a SmartStyle tucked inside the local Walmart. Most people never notice the thread connecting them. It is a single company in Minneapolis called Regis Corporation, and it has spent the last few years engineering itself so that it does not have to run most of those salons at all.
Regis is the operator and franchisor behind a portfolio of value hair brands: Supercuts, SmartStyle, Cost Cutters, First Choice Haircutters and the men's-grooming brand Roosters. Together they add up to more than 4,800 locations worldwide, which makes Regis the largest network of haircare salons on the planet. What is unusual is not the size. It is who holds the scissors.
The ModelThe business is the franchise, not the haircut
For most of its history Regis owned and operated its salons directly. That is a heavy way to grow: every new location means a lease, a build-out, payroll and the daily grind of running a small service business a few thousand times over. Starting around 2019, Regis reversed the logic. It sold company-owned salons to franchisees and moved to what the industry calls an asset-light model - the operators put up the capital and the labor, and Regis supplies the brand, the systems and the support in exchange for royalties and fees.
The result is leverage. A corporate staff of roughly 1,800 people steers a network of thousands of salons it does not have to staff or stock. The franchisee gets a recognized sign over the door and a playbook; Regis gets a royalty on the revenue and a lighter balance sheet.
What exactly does a franchisee buy? Not just a logo. Regis packages the unglamorous parts of opening a salon - site approval and lease negotiation, marketing and advertising programs, stylist and franchisee training, and ongoing operational support. For a first-time owner, those are the things that are easy to get wrong alone, and they are the reason a franchise can out-survive an independent shop next door.
Ongoing payments from franchised salons - the core, recurring revenue stream.
A smaller base of owned locations, expanded again through the 2024 Alline deal.
Professional and private-label haircare sold in salons and online.
Franchisee contributions that pay for shared brand marketing.
The BrandsFive doors, five kinds of customer
The portfolio is not five names for the same thing. Each brand points at a different customer and a different piece of real estate. Supercuts is the strip-center workhorse, built for a quick, no-appointment cut. SmartStyle lives inside Walmart stores, turning a weekly shopping run into a haircut stop. Cost Cutters plays to value-minded families. First Choice Haircutters carries a strong presence in Canada. Roosters leans into men's grooming, with shaves and a barbershop feel. One company, one royalty stream, several very different sidewalks.
The CustomerTwo audiences, one storefront
It helps to be clear about who Regis actually serves, because there are two very different customers and they rarely meet. The first is the person in the chair: someone who wants a reliable, affordable haircut without a lot of ceremony, usually close to home and often without an appointment. Across roughly 4,800 salons, those visits add up to millions of cuts, colors and blowouts a year - the kind of everyday transaction that is easy to take for granted precisely because it works.
The second customer is the person who buys the salon. Regis's franchise system is aimed at entrepreneurs - from single-unit owners running one shop to multi-unit operators building small local chains - who want the independence of owning a business without inventing every system from scratch. For that audience, the pitch is straightforward: a known brand, a proven format, and a franchisor whose incentives are tied to the franchisee's revenue rather than opposed to it.
The ExpertiseTraining is part of the product
A haircut chain is only as good as the stylists behind the chairs, which makes education one of the least visible but most important things Regis sells. The company invests in cosmetology training, stylist education and franchisee onboarding - the difference between a brand that looks consistent on a sign and one that feels consistent when you actually sit down. In an industry with high turnover, treating workforce development as a core function rather than an afterthought is part of how a network this size holds its standards together.
Alongside services, salons sell professional and private-label haircare products, and the company has built out digital and e-commerce channels to move them - gift cards, online ordering and the customer-facing tools that let a walk-in category behave a little more like modern retail.
The NumbersA turnaround you probably did not read about
Legacy retail is a graveyard, and for a while Regis looked like a candidate for it. Instead it restructured - shedding debt, shrinking its owned footprint and leaning on franchising - and came out the other side profitable. In fiscal year 2025 the company reported total revenue of $210.1 million, up $7.1 million from the prior year, with adjusted EBITDA of $31.6 million, an improvement of $4.1 million over fiscal 2024's $27.5 million.
The 2024 move that stands out runs against the asset-light grain. On December 19, 2024, Regis closed its acquisition of the Alline salon group, adding company-owned salon revenue back to the mix. Owning salons again may look like a reversal, but it is the kind of selective, cash-generating bet a stabilized company can make once its balance sheet is under control.
The HistoryFrom Kunin Beauty Salon to the world's largest
The company is older than the shopping mall it helped fill. It began in 1922 when Paul and Florence Kunin opened Kunin Beauty Salon. Their son, Myron Kunin, took the chain forward and built it out under the Regis name, reading the postwar retail shift early and moving salons toward freestanding and mall locations. Regis went public in the early 1990s, and in 1996 it acquired Supercuts - the deal that pushed it into strip centers, street locations and, decisively, franchising.
The FieldWhere Regis sits in the market
Regis competes in the value and family end of hair services, where the rivals are names like Great Clips, Sport Clips and Fantastic Sams, plus the independent salon or barbershop on every other block. The moat is not a single brand - it is the multi-brand franchise machine underneath them, and the century of operating knowledge that gets handed to each new franchisee. In a category defined by convenience and price, that shared infrastructure is what a solo operator cannot easily replicate.
The multi-brand approach is also a hedge. Placing SmartStyle inside Walmart, Supercuts in strip centers and Roosters in men's-grooming corridors means Regis is not betting the whole company on one type of location or one shift in how people shop. When one format softens, another can carry the weight - a spread of small, everyday bets rather than a single large one.
Leadership turned over in 2025. Matthew Doctor, who ran the company from 2022 and led much of the turnaround, stepped down as President and CEO effective June 30, 2025. Jim Lain, a longtime brand-operations executive, was named interim President and CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor. Dana Benfield serves as interim Chief Marketing Officer.
Strip down the marketing and Regis is a simple idea run at scale: help thousands of small-business owners sell an everyday service, take a slice of each sale, and keep the corporate machine light enough to survive whatever the retail cycle does next. It has been doing a version of that for more than a hundred years, which in this category counts as its own kind of durability.