From strategy to storefront: Seven questions with Hand and Stone Massage

In today’s business environment, the difference between success and failure often comes down to location. But making location-based decisions aren’t just about foot traffic anymore—it’s about understanding the complex interplay of demographics, competition, workforce availability, and consumer behavior that makes a location truly viable.

From Strategy to Storefront is our new client Q&A series that takes you inside the decision-making processes of industry leaders who are using location intelligence to drive real business outcomes. Each interview reveals how forward-thinking companies are moving beyond spreadsheets and intuition to make data-driven location decisions that impact everything from site selection to long-term strategic planning.

Through candid conversations with executives across industries, we’ll explore the challenges, successes, and lessons learned when location intelligence becomes central to business strategy. You’ll discover practical insights, real-world applications, and the tangible ROI that comes from making smarter location decisions.

In this Q&A session, we’ve asked the Director of Real Estate for Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa, Jackie Chamberlain, seven questions about the use of location intelligence and customer analytics in her role. Hand & Stone Massage is a franchised-based business operating 640 spas in the U.S and Canada.

Tell us about your role and how location intelligence fits into your day-to-day responsibilities.

Jackie Chamberlain: I am the Director of Real Estate for Hand and Stone Massage and Facial Spa, where location intelligence plays a crucial role in my daily responsibilities. My primary job is to select new locations for our franchisees. Established optimization points and trade areas set the parameters for the geographies where a franchisee can secure a franchise agreement.

By identifying these optimization points, I can search for suitable real estate before a franchisee even purchases the trade area, allowing us to expedite the process and achieve quicker openings.

Once the areas are selected, I utilize various reports, including a Market Shift report, which illustrates the anticipated percentage impact on neighboring spas. Additionally, I leverage our Custom Demographic report and compare it against established benchmarks. Kalibrate has helped us refine our site benchmarks using real data from existing spas. We can categorize this data based on different environments, ranging from rural to super urban, as each area has unique characteristics.

What’s the biggest location-related challenge your industry or company faces right now?

There are a few that come to mind from both an industry and company perspective.

Labor shortages in high-demand areas: finding and keeping licensed massage therapists (LMTs) and estheticians. Without enough skilled staff, spas can’t meet booking demand — leading to poor member retention and lost revenue.

High real estate costs in prime areas: Rent in ideal locations can be prohibitively expensive and cuts into margins for franchisees. This can lead to trade-offs between visibility and profitability.

Geographic saturation vs. Underserved markets: Expanding into oversaturated markets leads to competition and cannibalization. But going into underserved areas risks low membership conversion or insufficient foot traffic.

Zoning and regulatory hurdles: Different cities and counties have varying regulations for massage businesses — from zoning restrictions to licensing requirements.

Some municipalities impose stricter scrutiny due to concerns over illicit businesses, delaying or blocking legitimate spa openings.

How has working with location data changed the way you think about your business?

Working with location data transforms decisions from guesswork into grounded strategy, reducing complexity and improving operational efficiency. The Hand & Stone Real Estate team and franchise owners make smarter, faster, and more data-driven decisions about site selection, market planning, and our competitive positioning.

What’s one location decision that has impacted your business performance?

With more than 60% of our business generated from massage services, it’s critically important to understand the supply of our talented Massage Therapists.

We’ve leveraged Kalibrate to reflect both the density of massage therapists within each market as well as the locations of massage therapy schools and their proximity to our spas. When our spas are fully staffed, our member growth follows, so the importance of the ability to understand our labor pool is key in every trade area we pursue.

Which Kalibrate feature or insights do you find most valuable in your daily work?

The ability to publish professional maps combining multiple data layers based on need. We can look at items like competition, Massage Therapy Schools, nearby health and wellness businesses that might work well with our brand, consumer value, and mobility data.

The optimization points provide a search area, and the different labels and colors help us evaluate various points. An orange point indicates that it is near another trade area, so we would only present this to a nearby franchisee based on proximity and impact. Yellow points indicate there are constraints with Massage Therapists, which may pose challenges with labor availability.

When reviewing the available real estate within a trade area, I can generate an impact or cannibalization report, Market Shift report, for a specific location. This report shows the potential sales impact on existing spas, which is a crucial factor in our decision-making process.

I also create a custom demographic report to determine if the trade area meets the necessary benchmarks in terms of socio-economic and demographic criteria. Furthermore, I can drill down even deeper into the Mosaic consumer lifestyle segmentation. While there may be sufficient population in each area, we need to assess whether it aligns with our core consumer base.

Can you walk us through a recent project where location intelligence changed your approach or outcome?

In any franchise business, there is sensitivity to potential revenue impact or cannibalization to existing locations. As noted previously, the Market Shift Report allows us to calculate the potential revenue impact, or cannibalization, of a new location and assess the ultimate profitability loss to the nearby owner. Because our membership model allows members to use their benefits at any location, there is a significant amount of cross-location utilization and revenue transfer.

Recently we had two owners who were looking to grow on opposite sides of the state of Florida and we were able to provide insight on the activity of customers in both of the new growth areas, as well as the potential cannibalization using the Market Shift report. The analysis ultimately led to the franchise owners swapping their respective territories to mitigate the potential impact resulting in a better overall outcome for the brand and each of the franchise owners.

What would you tell a CEO/CDO who’s still on the fence about investing in location intelligence?

Kalibrate has added significant value to my day-to-day work and has been beneficial to our overall strategy. It’s been a huge time saver and has allowed me to make data-driven decisions. It also saves me an incredible amount of time as Kalibrate works diligently to streamline processes.

What I value most is the spirit of continuous improvement that the company embodies. Our business partners constantly listen and strive to implement changes that help us better utilize and interpret data. The communication, the training, and the positive attitude set this company apart.

I recently attended a client networking session that Kalibrate has implemented in various cities, and I was impressed that the CEO made the effort to attend and participate in the session.

For more information on Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa visit https://handandstone.com/.