Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I am your Britt Sev— I am your hos— you know what, I am your Britt Seva, your host for today’s podcast episode and I’m very excited to be here. I’m going to talk about Web 3.0 and what it could mean for our industry.
I think this is something that’s fairly mysterious to our industry, but it is not mysterious in the world around us and I want you to understand how it could affect you, what could potentially happen, to not be afraid of it, but to also realize it’s not going away and yes, it more than likely will affect you at some point.
Let’s talk about what Web 3.0 is exactly, what you should be concerned abou,t and how this might affect your day-to-day working life.
First of all, if you’re like, “What are you talking about, Web 3.0?”—have you ever heard of cryptocurrency or NFTs? If you have, those are Web 3.0 components. “Components” is probably the wrong wrong word to use, but when you hear people talk about an NFT, they’re talking about part of the world of Web 3.0.
Let’s go back in time. What is Web 1.0? Web 1.0 is basically the internet, the super universe that connects us all together through the computers we carry in our pocket through the wifi that spins around us through the air. Web 1.0 is the idea that we can connect with people literally a world away in half a heartbeat, that we can get the answer to any question we possibly have in less than a second through a simple online search.
I was talking to my daughter recently about research papers. I grew up in the nineties and when we had a research paper due, it was literally like, “Okay, go to the library.” We had to use a Dewey decimal system. You find a book, you hope somebody else hasn’t checked out your book because if that’s not there, you’re going to have to wait two weeks to get it. You had to do a bibliography with source notes and source cards, and you’re trying to write everything down. I mean, it was so much work and now these kids think they have it hard. They can just literally Google search everything and it’s right there, right? Plagiarism was so much less common when we were kids, because it was just as hard to copy every word from the book word for word as it was to think up original thoughts yourself. Versus now you can copy and paste everything. Like Cliff Notes was the best thing we have, but even that was kind of a pain in the butt, right?
Web 1.0 was the inception of the internet. As I’m even saying that, I remember when my family got internet and I remember my dad worked in IT and so we got it, I think probably fairly early because he actually used it for work to a capacity and it wasn’t normal. It wasn’t like all of my friends had it. I didn’t use it, like what business did I have on the internet? It was in high school that I really started using it a little bit, and it was a lot of AIM, a lot of AOL Instant Messenger. Sometimes I was Google researching things, but internet wasn’t commonplace. It wasn’t in every home. It definitely wasn’t on our phones.
This is why salons didn’t have websites. It was like, “Well, who’s even using it anyway?” Email was just starting to come out. I remember my freshman year in high school, they had us all create email addresses, but that was so brand new, like it was wild and it was foreign. They weren’t contacting parents by email. Not all parents had email, so everything was still physical letter.
There was a lot of thought that the internet was a fad that it wouldn’t stick around, that this is just the latest craze and it’s not going to be here, and now it runs our world. How do you feel when your internet goes out? How quickly can I get to a Starbucks hotspot? Because I can’t live my life like this, like it’s an actual problem, right?
That was Web 1.0. Web 2.0 is, in the simplest terms, social media. So it’s user generated content put onto platforms. Instagram is a super simplified Web 2.0. Essentially all social media is. Anywhere online conversations are happening about anybody, and it’s like crowdsourced content, photos, information. That’s going to be considered Web 2.0.
The problem with Web 2.0 is we get really annoyed fighting the algorithms, right? When you upload something to Instagram, who is actually in charge of that content? Adam Mosseri, right? CEO of Instagram. Or we could say Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. They get to make up all the rules. They’re the hosting platform. We have to live and die by the decisions they make, right?
How annoyed do you get when a client leaves you a review on a review site and it gets taken down? You’re fully out of control for that, right? You don’t know what happened to it. You don’t know where it went. It is hosted on a platform that is fully in control of even the things that are being done about your business, said about your business, it’s fully out of your control. Same thing.
Why can’t you get on the front page of Google? You’re not in charge of Google. That’s not for you to decide. You can work at it, work at it, work at it, but you’re not in the driver’s seat. You’re at the mercy of the tool and platform, right?
With Web 3.0, users fully own whatever content they’ve created. It could be a social media post or I should just say a post or a graphic. It could be a video that you create. You are the fully rightful owner.
Also there’s digital objects, right? We think about NFTs. There’s a lot of stuff where, when you’re buying an NFT, you’re buying digital art, right? We think of that as very typical traditional NFT. You’re the owner of it. You have all the rights to it, but it’s confusing because it’s like, I don’t understand, if I can do a Google search for that image. How is it that Joe Smith owns it? I can see it right here on Google, right?
We’re thinking of it in too simple of terms. Google is Web 1.0. NFTs and crypto are playing in a different world called Web 3.0 and you can’t look at Web 3.0 with Web 1.0 glasses on. You’re going to get diluted.
We have to understand this is completely new technology, so don’t try to have the frame of your previous understanding to go into this new concept, right?
Here’s where the blockchain comes in. Whatever asset you have—graphic, video, information, which we’ll talk about in a second—that information lives on the blockchain. The blockchain can be publicly monitored and rather than you being at the mercy of a platform like Instagram, you can shift your content wherever you want it to go. You can say, “I’m not on Instagram anymore. I’m taking this piece of content and putting it over here and it can live over here instead because it is being tracked and traced and housed on the blockchain versus being managed by Facebook, versus being managed by Google, versus being managed by Instagram.” It is being publicly tracked and traced in a blockchain system instead.
Let’s simplify it for a second. Have you ever bought tickets to a sporting event off a website? So Web 1.0 is like StubHub. There are tickets that were bought likely from a—I’m aSan Francisco Giants fan. Go Giants, Go Giants.
Let’s say that somebody bought tickets from the SF Giants. They’re a season ticket holder and they can’t make it to a game, so they list those tickets on StubHub. Somebody sees those tickets on StubHub. They decide, “Yes. I’d like to go to that game.” They buy the ticket through StubHub. StubHub makes a little bit of money. The season ticket holder makes the majority of the money and then I get to go to a Giants game. That would be a smooth transaction.
But if you’re like me, you’ve also had the StubHub thing happen where you buy tickets to a sporting event or a concert, you pay the money, StubHub takes their share, some mystery person out in the world takes the money, and I never get the tickets because the person who was selling the tickets never actually had them. It was done through fraud.
Well, in Web 3.0, that would be impossible because the tickets have to be verified on the blockchain before they can be transferred, and they would be traceable from the time they were produced by the San Francisco Giants to when they’d hit the blockchain. Joe Smith would take the tickets as the season ticket holder. There would be a transaction that takes place on the blockchain, you could see it on the ledger that Joe decided to give the tickets to me, so the San Francisco Giants could see that entire transaction. I can see that transaction. Joe can see that transaction. In fact, you can see that transaction. There is no doubt about the authenticity.
So there’s a lot of talk about blockchain being used for things like airline tickets, right? Tickets of all types. Something I think is interesting is hearing people talk about blockchain for medical records. I promise I’m going to relate this back to our industry in a second. Just go with me for a minute.
If you’ve ever changed doctors, dentists, vets, okay—if you have pets like me, every time you change vets, they’re like, “Okay, can you call your former clinic and have them send over all of Cooper or Coda’s records to us?” Sure. But if you’re also like me, you’ve moved around a bit and maybe you’ve even gone to different vets because sometimes you don’t click with somebody or you had to get a vaccine on the quick and your usual vet wasn’t available. My dogs have probably gone to like five or six vets over the years so to get a full and complete medical history, it’s like I’m chasing my own tail—no pun intended—where I’ve got to call multiple places. I’ve got to hope that they hurry up and send the records over, send ’em to the right place. Some people still use faxes, which blows my mind, but hopefully they have digital records that they can just email over to the new vet, but it takes time. It’s inconsistent. We hope that they send over everything in full.
There’s a lot of moving parts and pieces, versus if Cooper and Coda’s medical history lived on the blockchain, I could go to any vet anywhere and they could access them and see them at any time.
Now I know that a lot of times, as I’m saying this, it lives on the blockchain. Everybody can see it, as this technology develops the depth in which everybody can see will be managed in a smart way. So even if Cooper and Coda’s medical records live on the blockchain, there are ways that it can be secured where I can see the most. Okay, they’re my pets, I own the records, right? I can see the most. Maybe the vet tech can see a mid-range amount and then the veterinarian can see almost as much as I can. Maybe they can’t see my billing information or something else, but there are different ways to make it really safe.
Let’s say it’s my medical records. Again, I’d likely be the owner of the records. It’s about me. I get to see the most. Maybe the insurance company gets to see a certain portion and my medical service provider, no matter who I go to, no matter what hospital I’m at, gets to see a certain chunk too.
Have you ever been in a medical emergency or know somebody who has where they show up at the hospital and they’re unconscious, they can’t speak for themselves. Maybe they don’t have their wallet on them. Well, if they were to show up and someone were to know their identity and could pull it up on the blockchain, all their medical records would be there even if they couldn’t speak for themselves. There’s a lot of potential here with this system.
What does this mean for us? It means a couple. That was very high level and this is all very much emerging.
When we think about Web 3.0, NFTs, crypto, a lot of it seems very techy. Some of it is kind of dorky, some of it kind of weird, like we don’t even know what’s happening. Like when you look at NFTs, it was a lot of very overpriced digital art. That’s very much how it started and we’re like, “Whoa, NFTs are like weird random drawings that go for $60,000.” Not really. That was just this trendy thing that happened for a minute, but that’s not the point and purpose of it. Non-fungible tokens, which are NFTs, are non-capable records, photos, videos that are owned by a certain person.
When you hear the word “non-fungible,” it just means that whatever it is is unique and can’t be replaced with something else, right? My medical records are just my own. Even if I had a twin sister, we’d have different medical records, right. It would be impossible to have the same. The San Francisco Giants ticket. There could be 40,000 fans in the stadium, but I’m the only one in section 203 C 17 Row A. You know what I mean?
While there can be many of them, there are still uniques that cannot be duplicated and that’s what makes them non-fungible.
When we say NFT, non-fungible tokens, there’s only a certain limited amount, like maybe there’s 40,000 seats at the Giants game and I can only get one of them for September 17th in this specific seat, in this specific row. It’s a very oversimplified way of thinking about it. But anything that’s unique in that way could be considered an NFT.
When we look at who owns anything on the blockchain right now, whether it be cryptocurrency like a Bitcoin or something like that, or NFTs, it is estimated—I was not able to find a hard number—estimated that 12 to 25% of Americans currently are playing in Web 3.0 to some capacity, so 75% aren’t. I’m sharing that to tell you that, no matter what I say this week or next, because this is actually going to be a two parter. It doesn’t mean you have to jump on this right this second. But I think it’s important to understand what’s coming and what the potential is to get your wheels in motion.
Let’s think of something that’s an NFT in your business right now. I think color formulas could be NFTs, right? And I think it’s important to be aware of that your formula and my formula, even if walking down the street, it looks like we have identical hair color. I might have a higher percentage of gray than you do. We may have a different natural base. You might be color correcting something on my ends that we’re not correcting on yours. There’s all these different facets, right? And for the most part, most of our clients have fairly unique formulas, right? So that could be something that would live on the blockchain as an NFT and if Lucy left our salon and went to the salon down the street, she could potentially take her formula with her.
I think it’s important for us to understand that there is a real chance that that technology is coming and we can be annoyed by it. We can say it’s stupid because that’s what a lot of people said about Web 1.0, that the internet was stupid. They hate it. They’re going to rebel against it. That’s totally fine. But the reality is it might be what’s coming.
I believe that formulas are proprietary information, but there’s a lot of things that are proprietary information that are now being considered as something that would go Web 3.0. In thinking about that, we have to think about how we position ourselves beyond something like formulation skills since that is something that could be an NFT and could be knowledge-based, we can’t bank on just that alone.
For those of you who are color experts or color correction experts, or you focus on cut and color, I’m not saying ditch your specialty because I think it’s still really there, but you should know that I think there is a real possibility that in the not-so-distant future, things like color formulations could end up being an NFT that lives on the blockchain.
You could say, “Well, some people might do that, but I’m never going to do that.” How did that work out for all the stylists and salon owners who said they were never going to do Instagram? You can fight it. You can say, “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to upload my formulas there.” That’s cool. But for the hundreds of thousands of clients who see that as the benefit and who say, “I only want to work with stylists who are on the blockchain,” what are you going to do? What’s your plan?
You can’t fight consumer behavior. That’s why I think it’s important to say this and share this and think about this a little bit and think about how this could affect our industry.
If you’ve built a business on the back of, “I’m an amazing colorist,” “I’m amazing at formulas,” this is my word of warning to you: stay amazing at formulas, but don’t build your whole business on the back end of that because I don’t want you to be surprised in a few years when what I think will be technology that emerges comes along because if formulas become blockchain based, suddenly it’s something that you don’t own is something that Lucy owns and she can take it with her wherever she goes. So just something to think about.
Now, the other thing—I just had a thought though, let’s say you and I don’t know exactly how this technology will fare, so I’m just making a lot of projections. Let’s say that you create a formula and you put it on the blockchain so you own it. Maybe Lucy doesn’t have access to the details of the formula, because it’s your proprietary information. You own it. But when she leaves to go to a new stylist, she can buy it from you and that’s how the blockchain sales system works. Yeah, Lucy, you want your formula. It’s available to you for $1,000. She can choose to leave it and now you own Lucy’s formula, which may become valueless to you because she might go to a new stylist and say, forget it. I don’t care about that that much. Or she might say, dang it. “I really want that formula,” and now you’ve made a thousand dollars on it.
On the inverse of everything, I just said, that was scary about the idea of being a color specialist or somebody who does a lot of advanced formulation and saying like, “Listen, it could go blockchain based and it could be a little bit sketch,” if you were placing a value on your formulations and it became an asset that you could sell, how f-ing sexy is that?
That’s amazing because now how many of you feel awkward when a client comes to you and they’re like, “Hi, I’m leaving the state. Would you give me my formula?” A little part of you dies because you’re sad that the client is leaving, but also you’re like, “Girl, I worked three years to get this formula dialed in, and now you’re going to go to who knows who?” And they’re just going to get it handed it over and mix it up in a bowl like it’s nothing? It’s not offensive, but it’s heartbreaking because we work so hard to get here and now somebody’s going to get easy street to make it happen. It changes the conversation and it’s like, “Well, you know your formula lives on the blockchain. My current rate for formulas is $675, so what we can do is set up that transaction.” I mean, that’s kind of hot, right?
I don’t know how exactly all of this is going to shake out. Who’s going to be the proprietary owner. I think if you, as the stylist or salon owner was, that’s a game changer. But the problem is it’s almost like gambling in the stock market. There’s always the chance that Lucy’s going to go and she’s like, “That formula’s not worth $675 to me,” so she’s going to go to her new stylist. You’re basically going to have to throw Lucy’s formula in the trash can because it’s valueless now, right? You’re betting that clients will be willing to pay for those kind of things, but I think that the potential is there.
Y’all so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
