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Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick ass career as a hair stylist?
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I’m Britt Seva, Social Media and Marketing Strategist just for Hair Stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
I’m your host Britt Seva.
And today we’re talking about the collapse of retail sales in our industry.
I know it’s a really bold statement.
I do believe it’s true.
This is another one of the topics that I covered on the 2026 Predictions Podcast.
So this episode released publicly on September the 22nd, 2025.
It released privately to Thrivers a little bit before that.
But on that episode, I share a dozen or so different predictions that I strongly believe we will see an impact from in 2026.
You can listen to that podcast episode if you haven’t already.
It’s podcast episode number 404.
It’s called 2026 Predictions.
Talking about retail was one of them.
If you have not already, you can also go to thrivingstylist.com/mustknow.
We have a whole PDF doc that in depth breaks down all of the predictions I think are going to hit in 2026.
And if you haven’t read that or listen to the episode, I strongly strongly suggest that you do.
So last week, I talked about my concerns around salon policies.
This was the other point that I brought up in my 2026 predictions that Stylists and Salon Owners said, I need you to talk more about this.
I want to, before I get into my point of view and my prediction for what I think will be a pretty significant downfall, I want to share a bit more about my position on retail so that you understand the context that I’m coming from.
I think it’s important.
I’ve been expressing concerns about retail sales programs for years.
It’s probably no surprise to anybody that here I am on the show being like, really reconsider your retail because I’ve been saying that.
It’s not like I’ve ever said like, and retail sales are the best.
I’ve said for years, I don’t think that Stylist compensation should be attached to retail sales.
I think that the service revenue they do is the service revenue they do, despite the fact of if they sell shampoo or conditioner or not.
We’re going to talk about that today and why I believe that.
I’m going to go into a little bit deeper.
I think I’ve always kind of glazed over it.
I want to talk about like from a financial standpoint, not an emotional standpoint, not a fairness standpoint.
I don’t believe in the word fair.
I think fair is an F word.
I don’t believe in it.
It has nothing to do with the the financial data doesn’t support the system.
It like just literally doesn’t make any logical sense.
We will unpack that a little bit more, too.
I created a program called Retail Therapy that I shared to the industry, and I think it was 2016.
It’s a long time ago, but it’s still out there.
It’s still available.
It’s always been given free.
And it’s not something that’s an additional thing that people can buy.
But if you invest in Thrivers Society, depending on when you invest and how you invest, sometimes it’s one of the free trainings you can get.
And in Retail Therapy, I coach to healthy retail sales programs.
I don’t hate retail.
I want to be super clear on that.
I use professional hair care products.
I buy professional products from hair salons and estheticians and medical aesthetics professionals that I trust.
I’m a huge proponent of retail.
I don’t buy everything online.
I buy in stores, so I’m not saying I hate it and just don’t believe in it, and I think retail is the worst.
I think that retail has changed and no one’s talking about it, and we’re just pretending like we’re so confused as to why retail has gotten harder in the industry.
There should be zero confusion.
And so this episode is dedicated to debunking the confusion and talking about what’s actually happened and perhaps offering the opportunity for distributors to make a change or for you as a stylist or salon to really say, what lines do I want to carry in my salon that truly support my business and make profit possible for me?
Because a lot of retail lines and a lot of retail programs simply don’t.
That is what I want to speak to.
I want to just invite you to get curious about your retail program, about the brands that you carry, about the revenue, and stop looking at top line and start looking at bottom line and thinking about the way we’ve integrated retail into our business.
And if what we are doing still works or if it worked better in 1997 and should be left back there.
So like I mentioned, I talked about this on the Predictions Podcast.
In 2022, I predicted something I called the Great Divide.
That prediction was correct.
That prediction from almost four years ago.
Now you see people referencing it.
You see other stylists and other salons being like, it’s kind of like, we’re in a great divide.
Yeah, we are.
So that came true.
This is my next prediction.
And I think it’s a salon retail collapse.
I think we’ll start to see inklings of it next year.
I think in the next few years, it’s going to become pretty apparent.
I think that I’m certainly in this moment going to expose some hard truths.
But the reason why I felt like, oh, OK, the industry is ready for the conversation is I’ve seen other stylists making videos sharing the same concerns.
I think it’s just a conversation that we’re more ready for than we ever were before.
It’s not a new problem.
It’s simply a readiness for stylists and salons to be open to thinking a bit differently about retail and where it fits in our business.
When I talk to individual stylists and salon owners, so when I say individual stylist picture being like a studio suite owner in a studio trying to sell physical retail in their space, but it’s just them, they have no team.
Then also when I talk to salon owners who have either booth renters and they’re trying to have a retail program or employees and they’re trying to have a retail program, they’re having these challenges.
There’s been solutions that have been integrated into the industry like Salon Interactive being one of them.
There’s other brands too.
I’m not sponsored.
I don’t have a relationship with Salon Interactive, but I know that it’s a program that’s been relatively successful for stylists and salon owners where you can have your clients making online purchases from retail brands, and then you get a commission split, essentially.
I’m oversimplifying, but it kind of is an alternative to stocking retail in the salon.
There are these hybrid alternatives.
I think it’s something to get curious about.
We’ll talk about that more in the episode, but we have seen that shift.
So knowing that we know there’s a shift and we know that there’s issues.
The two biggest issues that I hear crossing my desk are one, stylists just aren’t selling retail.
That’s an issue that owners are complaining about.
It’s like, I’m trying, I’m educating, I have amazing lines.
This is stuff that everybody asked for me to bring in, and they’re simply not making the sales.
I also hear from, I get DMs from educators with different hair care brands who will message me.
I’ve probably gotten four in the last year, which is new.
I wasn’t having these conversations before, which again leads me to believe we’re ready to have them.
Educators from hair care brands coming to me and they’re like, what is happening?
Like our hair care brands aren’t changing the way that we are being advised to coach, to selling retail in the salon.
But part of our responsibility is getting our accounts to sell more retail and we can’t.
What are we supposed to do?
And I’ve engaged in conversations with these people and been like, well, here’s why that’s happening and here’s what’s going on.
And what’s been very interesting to me as an educator is having somebody come and ask me a question, be like, listen, this is the problem.
This is not working.
How do we resolve it?
And I’ll respond and say, well, the reason it’s not working is X, Y, and Z.
And what you’re asking for is for me to tell you how to convince Stylists to sell more retail.
I can’t do that for you.
That’s an impossibility.
And what I’m finding is a lot of hair care brands and a lot of educators are wishing that we could go back to 2006 and that the programs that worked back then would just work now and that Stylists would just get on board and we can make that work.
We can not.
The world is not 2006.
The world’s not 2012.
The world’s not 2019.
We do not get to go back in time and have the things that worked 20 years ago work now.
They don’t.
Which leads into problem number two, which is clients are buying elsewhere.
And so what the industry has chosen to lean into as the reason why that’s happening is what’s the number one reason that Stylists and Salons like to say is happening.
And to hair care brands, say it with me.
One, two, three, diversion.
We love to just blame diversion.
And we’re like, so the real problem is diversion in Amazon.
And if we could just convince our clients that what they’re buying could have sewage water in it and what’s being sold at Target shouldn’t actually be sold there.
And that’s illegal.
You’re blaming the wrong monster.
The monster is not diversion.
There was a time where diversion was an actual legitimate issue.
I remember I was pretty good friends with, I won’t name the brand, but I was really good friends with somebody who was our brand representative from a very well known, very prominent high-end luxury retail line.
And this would have been back in like 2010.
What she said was like, one of my jobs is I go to Walgreens and CVS and Target, and I’m supposed to buy up a certain amount of diversion off the shelves every single month, because our goal is to clean it up.
We’re trying to clean it out.
Like there was a time where that was a real thing.
It was a real concern.
It was an actual problem.
That is not what’s happening anymore.
Stop.
I don’t ever want to hear you say diversion to a client again, because you’re starting to sound like grandma and grandpa.
That’s not what is happening today.
So we have to stop leaning into that.
The other thing we try and lean into is shop small.
Does everybody notice that malls are closing, that in-person shopping is down, that retail is struggling when it comes to physical locations?
Trying to convince clients and consumers to do something that they are no longer wired to do is an uphill battle.
And we’re fighting the wrong war.
I want to look at what is actually taking place because this is the piece that we’re not talking about.
There are major structural changes that have happened in the world of professional hair care that are actually the problem here.
First and foremost, the most obvious is that professional brands are no longer exclusive.
That’s the monster.
If we want to have somebody to blame, that’s the blame.
I remember when I was looking for salons to work at in the mid 2000s, it was so important to me.
I was like, I want to work at a salon that carries X, Y, or Z hair care brand.
I really believed in the brands.
And I knew that having something luxury was a big deal.
I can remember clients coming in who were not coming to see us for services.
They got cuts and colors done somewhere else.
They came in and would buy $300 worth of shampoo and conditioner and masks and hair care products every few months because we were seen as a retail distribution center.
Like the hair care was one thing, the retail was another thing.
And by the way, when the narrative was, this is a second arm of your business, that was true.
That was totally true.
There was actually a time, I’m remembering as I’m saying this, the salon that I was a part of was in the Silicon Valley, which it looks so different back then than it does now, but that’s a different story for another day.
There was another high end area that was probably four miles down the road from us.
There is a serious consideration of, should we lease a space in this other area to just sell retail and do blowouts?
We really considered it because retail was such a huge arm of our business.
Tens of thousands of dollars, there was profit margin, like life was good, and we were moving so much product that it was like, do we just duplicate it and do it twice because it was going so, so well.
We were the number one treatment selling salon in the entire San Francisco Bay Area, which is a huge market.
Like we had it dialed.
We were doing good work.
We were making good money.
Like it was popping.
That was a time when this brand that I’m mentioning and the other four brands we carried could only be bought at a salon that was licensed and approved to sell the product.
So yeah, diversion was real and diversion exists because the model was different.
And you will be hard pressed to find a professional hair care brand now that doesn’t allow consumers to go directly to their website and buy a product.
That changed in the last 10 years and we’re not even talking about it.
There are mainstream luxury, formerly professional hair care brands that started making themselves available to Sephora 12 years ago that are now in Ulta.
I mean, I can name a million places.
Some do, I’m sorry, some do sell directly to Target.
Some do have shops on Amazon.
So we’re blaming Diversion, my friends.
It’s not Diversion, it’s the choice that these brands have made.
And the reality is that we’re not talking about is the relationship used to be hair care brand partnered with Stylist and Salon.
Now, hair care brand is not just B2B, it’s B2B, which is business to business.
And it’s also B2C.
They are selling direct to consumer.
You are competing with your own distributors.
And their opportunity is to go big box and improve their margins and sell directly to consumer, which is like pure money in the pocket for them.
Removing you is the middle man.
And that’s the bigger issue.
And the thing that we’re not really thinking about is, yeah, you can try and convince clients to shop small.
And that’s, I think, sometimes like the advice that even the distributors give.
If they really wanted the consumers to shop small, they would stop selling online.
Like you are competing with the distributor who’s telling you to convince your clients to shop small.
It’s so wild.
Like that’s the relationship that’s changed.
And that’s the piece that I think we’re not supposed to talk about.
That is the reality of what has happened.
The other thing is that most retail programs are no longer set up for profit.
For a few different reasons.
One, the model has massively changed, which we already unpacked here.
Because the model has massively changed, Stylists and salons are having a harder time moving their inventory.
So I recently was talking to people about this.
I can’t remember if it was in a boot camp or if it was in Thrivers.
It doesn’t matter.
But one of the things I said was somebody was going back and forth with me.
They’re like, nope, you’re wrong.
Our retail program is incredibly successful.
We move a lot of product and there’s profit left at the end of the month.
I was like, that’s amazing.
I was like, do me a favor.
I want you to go in and I want you to count up all of the retail that’s on your shelves right now that has been sitting there that has not sold.
It’s been sitting on your shelves for 60 days or more, and those products aren’t moving.
And the owner said, that would take me a long time and I don’t think I would like the answer it would give me.
And I said, I get it.
That’s the piece again that we don’t talk about.
So let’s say, actually, here’s the fact.
I don’t know of a single salon or stylist who sells through all of their inventory every single month.
There’s always retail left over.
There’s always inventory that sits on the shelves.
Does everybody know when you look at a retail bottle or tub or whatever, on the back, there’s an expiration.
Like it’ll look like a little shampoo or conditioner and it’ll say like 12 or nine or 18.
That’s how many months the product is good for.
It has an expiration.
I remember in the salon, there were times that products sat so long that the product expired and spoiled and a client would go to use it and it would stink.
Like you could tell it was old and bad because it had been sitting on our shelves for years, not moving.
If at a glance you look and let’s say you invest $400 in a retail line in a month and you sell 600 and you’re like, no Britt, see, we made $200 in profit.
I challenge you because one, if you’re commissioning your stylist, you didn’t make 200.
Two, there’s a reinvestment cost that has to be made.
And three, you’re not factoring in the retail that is sitting on your shelves as dead weight that you’re not moving.
We did an analysis of a retail program.
And this is in Thriving Leadership Method.
You can watch this slide by slide, step by step.
And the example that we shared in the data that we used was imagining that there was a salon that had a retail sales program where they invested $500 to buy into a retail line, which by the way, is tip of the iceberg.
I was coaching a salon owner a few weeks back and she was like, I’m opening a new salon and I’m looking to buy into a retail package.
And they’re quoting me $4,500 for the intro kit.
Should I do it?
So the fact that I’m using 500 for an example is like child’s play.
It’s laughable.
But let’s say that you could invest in a retail line for a $500 launch kit.
Let’s just keep the numbers easy.
So buy for $500, sell for $1,000.
That’s what we’re advised to do, right?
Buy for $100, sell for $1,000.
Then you think, perfect, I make $500 profit.
But you don’t because you went into $500 debt to buy that first launch.
Even if you’re like, no, no, I had the cash.
Okay, I got it.
But just you’ve created a deficit in your business to stock those shelves.
We immediately forget that deficit.
So when you buy for $500, sell for $1,000, the first $500 you make has to go back to repaying that deficit you created for the beginning.
But you also have to restock the shelves.
So some of what you recoup goes to restocking the shelves.
Over time, you do pay back the deficit.
It takes five cycles.
We’ve mathed it out.
It takes about five cycles to fully repay back the deficit and come out ahead.
That’s best case scenario.
If you’re selling through everything you buy, which we know that people don’t.
So we mathed it out and we’re like, buy, sell, restock, commission, buy, sell, restock, commission.
We mathed this the whole way through.
A salon that started with a $500 investment and a keystone markup would need to have sold $3,120 in retail for the owner to have profited $364.
I want you as the stylist or salon owner to think about how much work goes into five reordering cycles of a salon line buying, ordering, shipping, receiving, potentially labeling, entering inventory into your computer, doing that five times, selling $3,000 worth of retail.
If you sell through everything, you’ll have made $364.
Most of you are making more than that in services in one day, and you’re making that over months and months and months and months of retail sales.
And the reason why we don’t realize this is happening is we’re not looking at the math all the way through.
All we’re looking at is buy for $500, sell for $1,000.
There’s money left over at the end of the month.
I’m going to go back and buy more stuff.
And you’re in this loop.
Because as soon as the cash comes in, you’re placing another order.
Like I know the box is showing up next month, full of more product to sell.
Meanwhile, you are competing with distributors and you are selling, they are your competition.
Like that is what’s happened.
So this is an invitation for you to do a couple of things.
Rethink your retail program.
Really get into the math.
I want you to calculate how many hundreds or thousands of dollars of bottles you have on your shelves.
Think about how much you’ve invested over the last year versus how much you’ve brought in, how much you’ve paid out in commissions, the effort it takes to run the program.
If it makes sense for you.
What I will say is I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
I’m not anti-retail.
I have very serious concerns around the structure that’s in place in our industry today.
Based on everything I just said, can you see why I don’t believe that stylists who don’t sell retail, but are great service producers should be penalized in their payroll because of it?
Some of you have compensation programs where a stylist paycheck relies on how much retail they sell when you’re not even turning a profit on that.
So you’re holding them liable for selling something that to you is not even generating real revenue.
And some of your stylists are amazing stylists who just don’t care to sell retail.
And you’re holding them back because of it in a model that’s arguably failing us.
I just I invite you to get curious and think a little bit differently about like, I don’t want to say too much, but like think about why that structure might be in place and if it really makes sense for you and for your business.
Really get curious about it.
There was a time where I think that made a lot of sense.
I just don’t think it makes sense anymore.
I think too much has changed.
All that being said, I’m not anti-retail.
I think that retail still has a place in the salon.
I think we need to change our relationship with it, change what it means.
I do believe it when stylists say, retail deepens the relationship with the client.
I agree.
I cannot disagree with that.
I know that there are service providers I’ve worked with who I seriously love.
The woman, Alex, who does my extension, she can try and sell me anything and I’m gonna buy it, just because I really respect her and I trust her and I get it.
I’m not saying retail is the worst.
What I’m saying is I don’t think we have a firm perspective on what it means, how it works in our industry anymore.
I invite you to get curious.
I hope this has been a thought-provoking one.
Like I said, if you’ve not listened to my predictions episode, you really, really should 404 or head to thrivingstylist.com/mustknow to get your hands on that PDF.
I think business in the industry is changing next year.
I’m really excited about it.
I think only good things to come.
I think for those of us who choose to get serious, the best is really yet to come in this industry and I’m excited to be a part of it.
All right.
So much love, happy business building and I’ll see you on the next one.
