Sutherland & Barnett

Sutherland & Barnett is an established hair salon in Nottingham’s Lace Market and a long-term Air66 client. When we first started working together they were well known locally but virtually invisible online. Competitors owned the map pack and the organic results for ‘hair salon Nottingham’ and ‘hairdressers Nottingham’, and the salon was relying on walk-ins and repeat clients.

We fixed that. Getting to the top three for those terms took a sustained eight to twelve months of on-page work, technical foundations, local content and Google Business Profile management.

Then the brief changed. Under new ownership the salon developed its own-brand range of home care and styling products, and the business model changed with it. The salon result no longer ends at the chair. It ends at home, with the products that keep the colour, the condition and the finish going between appointments.

That created two problems the old site could not solve. It was a brochure site with no real commerce behind it, so the range had nowhere to live and nothing to sell it. And any rebuild carried a real risk: a migration done carelessly would throw away a search position that had taken a year of work to earn.

We rebuilt the whole thing on Shopify, and we built it properly.

A custom theme, not a template. We designed the entire site in Figma first, as a working design system with its own colour tokens, type scale and component library, then built it as a bespoke Shopify theme on Shopify’s Skeleton base. No page builder, no bought template, no bloat. Self-hosted fonts, hand-written CSS, and a component for every part of the site.

One platform for the salon and the shop. The site is a booking-led brochure site and a store at the same time. Services, the team, the journal and the salon story sit alongside a full ecommerce experience: product pages, four shop-by-concern collections, a slide-in basket, and a checkout. Bookings run through the salon’s own booking portal, integrated directly into the site so clients never feel handed off.

Built around the complete solution. The whole site is structured around one idea: your salon result, made to last. Four service journeys, led by colour, each carry the client from choosing the service through to the in-salon experience and then on to the home care that maintains it. Product pages carry real depth, with benefits, ingredients, how to use, hold and shine ratings on the styling range, and the salon’s in-salon refill offer. And we built Find Your Routine, a guided quiz that asks four questions and builds the client a personalised three-product routine they can add to the basket in one click.

Content the salon can actually run. Team profiles, journal posts, service menus, prices and imagery are all managed by the salon in Shopify, with no developer involved. The site grows with them.

SEO protected, not gambled. The migration was planned around the rankings. Page structure and the content that was earning those positions carried across, every old URL was mapped and redirected, and technical foundations were rebuilt cleanly rather than inherited. The Google Business Profile work, the local content and the ranking monitoring all continue exactly as before. The rebuild was designed to add commerce without spending a single position.

Sutherland & Barnett now have a complete solution rather than a brochure. The salon and the product range sit on one platform, and every service page leads naturally to the home care that maintains the result.

The search position held. They remain in the top three for their most important local terms, including ‘hair salon Nottingham’ and ‘hairdressers Nottingham’, and the SEO and Google Business Profile work continues rather than stopping at launch. That organic presence still brings new clients in without ongoing ad spend, only now those clients arrive on a site that can also sell to them.

The salon owns the whole thing. It is fast, accessible, built to their brand rather than a theme’s, and their team can run it day to day. It is also built to keep going: subscribe and save, bundles and further range expansion can all be switched on without another rebuild.