No forms, no booking engine, no discovery call with a salesperson. The practice begins the way it continues — with one quiet message, read personally, answered honestly, and followed by exactly as much paperwork as your side wants and no more.
1 line
Enough for a first message
<48h
Personal reply, always
0
Forms, funnels or software
None
Name required to start
Write, yourself
One email, one line, no ceremony. 'I'm in Manchester in March and I need someone discreet' has started arrangements that are still running five years later. She reads everything personally; nothing is triaged by software or staff, because there is no software and there are no staff.
Send your office
Assistants, agents, managers and family offices are most of the inbox — fluent, anonymous and welcome. No name is needed to begin: a city, a window and a way to reach you discreetly is a complete first message. The NDA can be signed before any name crosses the table.
Be vouched
The oldest door and still the widest: a current client says a quiet word, and the introduction arrives with trust pre-installed. If you know someone in the book — and statistically, you may — that word is worth more than any email.
People agonise over the first email. Don’t — here is a perfectly complete one, with notes on why each line earns its place. Steal it word for word if you like.
To: private@melissa-salons.com
Subject: A private enquiry
“Writing on behalf of a principal…”
Or not — write as yourself if you prefer. Both read the same to her.
“…based between Cheshire and London…”
Geography is the most useful fact you can give. Names are the least.
“…hair that has to survive a public year…”
One phrase about the life the hair leads tells her more than a paragraph of preferences.
“…we'd want terms and an NDA before names.”
Normal here, not rude. Saying it upfront saves a whole email.
“Best reached on this number, afternoons.”
A discreet channel and a window. That's everything the first 48 hours needs.
It's read
By her, on her phone, usually the same day. There is no inbox queue and no assistant doing a first pass — the first pair of eyes on your message is the only pair of eyes that will ever see it.
The reply
Personal, specific and honest — including when the honest answer is no, or not until April. If a diary can't take you properly, you'll be told immediately rather than strung along politely.
A call, if useful
Fifteen minutes, with you or your office — whoever you prefer. The questions are practical: the life the hair leads, the diary it survives, what discreet needs to mean in your particular case.
Dates, pencilled
A first appointment is held in the diary as initials. NDAs, terms and invoicing details are settled between her and your side in the same pass — one document, boring on purpose.
The first appointment
At home, at a hotel, or three floors above Tib Street behind a door with no sign. From here, the rest of this website happens.
The conversation
Twenty minutes before scissors are even mentioned. The diary, the cameras or absence of them, the regrets about the last decade of haircuts, the photograph you almost didn't bring. This is the appointment's foundation.
The audit
Hair, scalp, history — what's been done to it, what it does at 6am, what water it lives in across your addresses. Most heads have never actually been read before; it shows, and then it stops showing.
The plan
Where the hair should be in twelve months and the quiet route there — season by season, appointment by appointment. You'll hear the honest version, including the parts that take patience.
The work — or not
Some first appointments end with a transformation; many end with deliberately little. Nothing irreversible happens on day one unless you arrived asking for it. Trust is cut slowly.
It depends on the arrangement — a standing household retainer and a single carpet day are different undertakings. What's universal: rates are stated plainly in writing before anything is booked, they never change mid-engagement, and there is no premium for who you are. Only for hours, travel and the standard.
No forms, no booking systems, no records you didn’t agree to. Write a line — or have your people write it — and Melissa will reply personally.
Or by introduction, through a current client