This case study is part of IFA’s ongoing effort to showcase how franchisors are identifying challenges, seizing opportunities, and building scalable solutions that benefit franchisees, customers, and the communities they serve.

We interviewed MassageLuXe President and CEO Kristen Pechacek about how her massage and skincare franchise built a condensed, lower-commitment facial service to introduce massage guests to a side of the business they rarely experience — and turn first-time guests into recurring members.

What was the challenge or opportunity your innovation addressed?

Massage is the lifeblood of the MassageLuXe business. It accounts for roughly 80 percent of the services its spas perform, and about 70 percent of spa revenue is generated by monthly paying members — a recurring-revenue model built largely on massage. The other 20 percent of the business comes from facials, and most facial clients first walk through the door for a massage.

That overlap created both a challenge and an opportunity. Converting a massage guest into a facial client is one of the industry’s biggest opportunities because facials are still unfamiliar to many consumers. While more than 20 percent of the population gets a massage each year, far fewer people have experienced a professional facial. As Pechacek explained, it’s a service you have to try before you can fully appreciate it, which makes getting someone to book that first facial the biggest challenge.

Historically, MassageLuXe offered only a full-hour facial and tried to cross-sell guests into it. But asking a massage client to commit to a second hour-long service — turning a one-hour visit into a two-hour one — was a hard sell. The opportunity was to lower that barrier: give guests a short, low-commitment taste of a facial so they could experience it for themselves and consider booking the full service next time.

What did your brand do — what was the project or initiative?

MassageLuXe’s answer was the Express Refresh Facial: a condensed, 30-minute service designed to give someone who had never had a facial a real sense of the full experience. Rather than discounting the existing hour-long facial, the brand shortened the service — a decision that effectively doubled the facial capacity its spas could offer in the same window of time.

The pairing was deliberate. Guests were already accustomed to a 90-minute massage visit, so a 60-minute massage followed by a 30-minute Express Refresh Facial fit a familiar rhythm: a quick, relaxing introduction to skincare without giving up two hours of the day.

Rolling it out across the system meant more than adding a menu item. MassageLuXe developed the service protocol — how the facial is actually performed — and built training on two fronts: for spa front-desk teams to talk about the service, and for aestheticians to deliver it. The brand also created marketing materials, operational guidelines, and the metrics to measure whether it was working. The goal throughout was straightforward: get a guest to try the 30-minute service, then rebook for the full hour to experience it completely. Underpinning all of it was a brand message that a MassageLuXe membership can be used on either massage or facials — that skincare sits alongside massage as a core part of what the brand offers.

How were franchisees and the franchisor involved?

The franchisor supplied the foundation — the playbooks, the protocols, and the conviction that the service would grow facial volume over time. But franchisees were the ones who drove adoption, implementing the Express Refresh Facial in their spas and, most importantly, putting it in front of guests.

While the brand did run some paid media behind the launch, the biggest driver of sales was not new traffic — it was cross-selling guests who were already walking in the door. At its core, the initiative was a way to increase basket size and broaden the mix of services each guest experienced. As Pechacek framed it, marketers tend to fixate on getting more people in; this was about getting more out of the people already coming in.

That made execution at the spa level pivotal. The franchisees who understood the role their front desk and massage therapists play in guiding guests toward the facial side of the business were the ones who saw it pay off.

What were the results?

The initiative is still ongoing and still evolving, but the early results showed a clear lift in facial volume.

In the month the Express Refresh Facial launched, it already accounted for 27 percent of all facials performed across the system. Month over month after launch, MassageLuXe saw roughly a 20 percent increase in the number of facial services delivered — more than 2,000 additional facials across the system in a single 30-day span.

Just as important, the service reached beyond the existing membership base. In the month after launch, the brand saw a 5 percent lift in non-members getting facials — exactly the kind of prospect the initiative was designed to attract. And those new guests converted: over a four-month span, roughly 6,000 guests received the Express Refresh Facial, and 782 of them went on to become members — the recurring relationships that anchor the system’s stability and rate-card revenue. For a service that is not typically a high-conversion driver, that was a notably strong return.

Anything you’d do differently if you could?

Pechacek is quick to say the initiative is not finished — she expects the Express Refresh Facial to keep evolving. If there is one thing she would refine, it is how results are reported back to the system.

Much of the time, she explained, performance is communicated as system-wide averages or totals. But those numbers can obscure what is actually achievable. Some franchisees dive deep into new initiatives with enthusiasm; others, stretched thin or hesitant about change, are slower to commit. Reporting only the average flattens that difference.

Her preference going forward is to isolate and showcase the spas that executed best — to break results into cohorts or tiers showing how the top 25 percent of the system performed versus the middle and the bottom. Seeing that spread, she believes, makes the upside tangible and reinforces a larger point: when franchisees fully buy into an innovation, it can move the business.

This case study is part of the International Franchise Association’s ongoing effort to showcase how franchisors are identifying challenges, seizing opportunities, and building scalable solutions that benefit franchisees, customers, and the communities they serve.