Our Story
Claire Monroe started her own salon suite in 2020 and took her newsletter seriously from day one. One email a month grew it into a multi six-figure business on a four day work week, with fewer than a thousand followers.
What her results showed her is that your whole digital presence, the emails, the website, and how everything looks and feels once someone finds you, is what builds trust and brings clients back. It's what lets you look as professional online as you are in person, and it's harder to translate than it sounds.
So she started helping other beauty businesses do the same, first with email and blogs, and then it grew into design. That's when she met Laura, an expert in web design and the missing piece. Laura makes everything beautiful. She takes the templates Claire knows work and takes them to the next level by honing in on each brand, so the website, the emails, and the social media templates all feel cohesive and considered, right down to the last detail. After working together for a while, the two of them got coffee and knew they had to bring it all together.
One place, one full package. No hiring a million different teams, or piecing together a designer and a VA and then having to explain what balayage is. They know this industry from the inside. Claire has been a hairstylist for more than twenty years, in just about every kind of salon there is. Laura has designed websites for hairstylists and beauty businesses for over a decade. And Melinda, who worked with Claire at a salon for a long time, runs salon operations, so she knows exactly what it takes to keep a busy team and a busy front desk moving.
Why Savoir Faire?
Savoir faire is a French expression that means to be done well, and it's the standard the team holds itself to. They're perfectionists. Every detail is considered, every piece is cohesive, and everything looks incredible without looking like it took any effort at all. The name leans into that French chic woman who somehow has the right shade of lipstick and the right outfit without trying, and everything is set up so your business feels that way too.
THE STRATEGISTMeet Claire
Claire Monroe is the founder and lead strategist behind Savoir Faire, and quite possibly the only person in the beauty industry who gets genuinely excited about a well built email workflow.
Before Savoir Faire, Claire has worked in almost every version of this industry you can imagine. Commission salons with a tier system and an apprentice program she ran herself, in the suburbs. Sets and a Chelsea neighborhood salon in New York City. A small-town spa, color correcting in a green room. An in-home studio. A handful of moves that meant starting a client book over from nothing, more than once. She finally opened her own studio in the middle of the pandemic, with a small handful of clients who trusted her enough to show up anyway. She grew it into a multi six-figure business, and she did it without posting more. She did it by finally treating email like the tool it actually is.
That shift did more than fill her books. It let her raise her prices to celebrity stylist rates in the suburbs. Move her studio to five minutes from home. Take a four month maternity leave and come back without rebuilding a thing. It's why she started building systems and writing emails for other salon owners in the first place. The thing that gave her back her life was too good to keep to herself.
Off the clock, she's a wife and mom to a toddler son, and fiercely protective of her time with her family. Work life balance isn't a buzzword to her, it's the whole reason she builds systems that run without her hovering over them. She loves to travel with her family, they have two impossibly fluffy cats named Noodle and Moose, and she's WSET Level 2 wine certified, which mostly just means she has a real excuse for how much she loves talking about pairings.
Every system Savoir Faire builds comes from someone who has actually lived the chaos it's meant to solve.
THE CREATIVELaura makes everything we build feel like yours.
Every email template, every Jotform, every Instagram set, every printed piece. Before it reaches you, it passes through Laura's eye, where the colors, the typography, the spacing, and the small editorial touches are tuned to your brand instead of ours. The result is that your clients never feel a shift in voice or visual identity when something new arrives in their inbox. It just looks like more of you.
After 20 years of designing websites and working with hundreds of beauty business owners, hair and beauty has naturally become her speciality. Along the way, she’s developed a deep understanding of what beauty businesses actually need from their online presence, not just how to make a website look beautiful, but how it should communicate, build trust, showcase expertise and ultimately support the way a beauty business works.
That experience is what sits behind Savoir Faire. It isn’t a marketing agency that happens to work with beauty businesses; it’s a design-led studio built from years of working closely within the industry. Every website, brand and piece of content is shaped by that knowledge, with the kind of considered, personal approach you’d expect from a small studio that really knows its clients.
Meet Laura
THE OPERATIONS ANCHORMeet Melinda
Melinda Runyon has spent more than a decade inside the beauty industry, moving through roles behind the chair, in bridal services coordination, and salon management. After relocating to Northern Virginia from Charleston, SC in 2018, she continued her work in salon management, where she crossed paths with Savoir Faire's founder, Claire. What began as colleagues became a partnership rooted in a shared understanding of what beauty business owners truly need.
She knows what it feels like to be pulled in every direction; to love what you do and still feel the weight of everything that comes with it. At Savoir Faire, Melinda's role is to take the digital side of your business off your shoulders entirely. The systems, the workflows, the online presence, she handles it all so you can stay focused on the clients in your chair and the life you are building outside of it.
As a wife and mother to a busy three year old named Poppy, Melinda knows firsthand that systems are not a luxury, they are non-negotiable. The right infrastructure quietly holds everything together, freeing you to show up fully, both in your business and at home. That is exactly the kind of support she brings to every client she works with at Savoir Faire.
