Couple brings spa service to homes

An entrepreneur and at the same time a spa lover has seen the huge untapped market in providing home service spa.     Jojo Tiongko and his wife Niña opened in May last year Home Sweet Home Spa, a home and hotel service spa that is now slowly etching its name in Cebu’s spa industry.

Home Sweet Home Spa was born out of the frequent visits of the couple in different spas in the country.

Tiongko said that as spa goers themselves, they saw a huge potential on investing in the spa industry so they decided to put up their own start up spa business.

However, instead of building their own establishment, which would require intensive amount of capital, the couple decided it would be better to put up a home service spa instead which would cost them lesser capital.

Aside from the intensive capital, Tiongko said that Cebu has become a saturated market with spas mushrooming everywhere that it will be hard for them as new players to compete.

“There is so much competition and it is very hard to find a good area to open a brick and mortar spa,” he said.

He said that home service spa is a totally different concept from the conventional spa concepts in the market.

“Clients need not drive their way to the spa and so they can minimize their transportation expenses. In regular spas you need to travel home after you have relaxed,” he said.

However Tiongko stressed that despite their minimal investment, operations is very tedious as they deal with human relations and operation cost is also relatively expensive because of their high overhead as well as the high fuel maintenance.

“It’s a very lucrative business but very hard to maintain. It may sound easy but most players who have been ahead of us in this business were not able to maintain their operations,” he pointed out.

Tiongko said that since they deal more on their people, they made sure to hire an HR officer to maintain the level of quality of their therapists because they are the ones who come in close contact with their clients.

“In a business like this, trust is a big factor so we make sure we have well-trained therapists, honest and committed so that our clients will trust them and receive them in their homes,” he said.

Currently Home Sweet Home Spa has 14 therapists who work base on calls and bookings from clients.

In a day, the spa service an average of 20 clients wherein each therapist services around three clients who are mostly from the A, B and upper C segment of the market.

Home Sweet Home Spa offers a wide range of spa services which include Thai, Shiatsu, and Swedish body massage, foot reflex, body scrub, foot scrub, as well as salon-related services such as body bleach, underarm bleach, facial diamond peel, facial massage, underarm wax, Brazilian wax, and leg wax among others.

They offer these services from nine o’clock in the morning until two o’clock in the early morning.

Home Sweet Home not only services residences from Metro Cebu but also to other cities and municipalities outside Cebu as far as Liloan but services outside Mandaue and Cebu City is subjected to additional transportation charges.

After the success of their operations, Tiongko is looking at further growth through opening in other areas outside Cebu.

Currently, Home Sweet Home has a franchised outlet in Ormoc City but Tiongko stressed that they will go full blast in their franchising venture once they maxed out their existing operations here in Cebu to provide protection and support to their future franchisees. — Rhia de Pablo