The barbershop stamp card your clients can't leave at home

Six works for most shops. Barbershop clients come in every three to five weeks, so six cuts lands the reward roughly four to six months out — near enough that the card stays worth carrying, far enough that you're giving away about one cut in seven. If your regulars are skin-fade clients who come every two or three weeks, five is fine; if they stretch to six weeks between cuts, keep it at six rather than going higher, or the free cut sits more than a year away.

No. The card is an Apple Wallet or Google Wallet pass, so it uses the app already on their phone. They scan your QR code once at the chair, tap add, and it sits next to their bank cards and boarding passes — no download, no account, no password to forget. That matters in a barbershop, where you have about ten seconds of a client's attention while they pay.

Stampd is €5 a month, or €50 a year. There is no hardware to buy, no per-stamp fee and no contract — you stamp from the phone in your pocket. The only other cost is the reward itself: at six stamps you're discounting roughly one cut in seven, which is cheaper than the walk-in you lose to the shop down the street.

No — the stamp comes from your phone, not theirs. At the end of the cut you open Stampd, scan the pass on their phone, and the stamp is added; it takes a couple of seconds while they're paying. Because only your device can issue a stamp, one visit is one stamp, which closes the two holes paper punch cards have: clients punching their own card, and a card being passed round a group of friends.

Yes. Each barber can run a separate Stampd account at €5 a month with their own QR code, reward and colours, so the stamps follow the barber a client books with rather than the shop sign. If the shop would rather own the relationship, run a single card for the whole shop and stamp it from the front-desk phone. Decide which before you print QR codes — it's the awkward thing to change once clients are collecting stamps.

Walk-ins are where it helps most. A walk-in leaves with no next appointment and nothing tying them to your chair, so the next haircut goes to whoever has a free seat that day. Scanning the QR code takes about ten seconds at the till and puts a card in their wallet with the first stamp already on it, and that card is still there in three weeks. It also sits happily alongside a booking system — Stampd handles the returning, not the scheduling.

A free cut is the clearest reward and the one clients actually count toward, which is why most barbershops use it. If a full cut is too much to give away at your prices, a beard trim, a hot-towel shave or a fixed amount off the next cut all work — the reward text is yours to write. Whatever you pick, keep it to one line a client can read on a wallet pass, and don't change it halfway through: people who are four stamps in notice.