Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hairstylist? 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 weren’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 Siva, social media and marketing strategist just for hairstylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist podcast.
What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Siva, and this is the episode a lot of listeners wait all year for. There’s some people who don’t even listen to the podcast, but always come back for this one. This is my 2027 Predictions episode. I started doing these in 2018, so almost a decade. And I go back and listen to all of them. They’re all still public. And I think the reason why people always come back to this annually is because my track record is very good. There’s not a lot of misfires in my predictions, maybe two in the last 10 years across dozens of predictions. So if you wanna know what’s coming in the industry and where it’s heading, I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m good at reading trends. I specialize in looking at consumer behavior.
Uh, one of my advantages is I have the data of thousands of stylists and salons. I’m able to look at the back end of P&Ls at scale. I’m looking at marketing data at scale. I, I’m looking at business analytics for independent stylists and salon owners and the industry at large in a unique way that a lot of others just don’t get access to. And it, it does end up being the secret weapon where I’m able to see the trends, spot the patterns and kinda get a good sense of what’s going on and where we’re heading over the next 12 months. So before we get into what I think is coming for 2027, I wanna kinda go back to what I predicted in 2026, or for 2026 and 2025. The episode’s still live. You can go back and listen to it if you want to. And at that point, I listed 14 predictions.
That was a lot. Uh, this year we just have eight, but I wanna go through what I predicted last year and you can decide if I was right or wrong. So my first prediction was that unearned price increases will have a relatively strong backfire. That is correct. If you look at universal spending data across the consumer market in our industry specifically, that is a huge issue right now. And there’s a lot of data from consumers on that. You’ll find it when you see people saying, “I don’t feel like I’m getting what I paid for. Stylists are a ripoff.” And trust me, I understand all of that content that’s on TikTok and Instagram right now of clients in their car crying about how they got ripped off by a stylist. I know how annoying that is, wouldn’t be me. Like I understand the frustration with it.
I understand it’s your livelihood. I understand you have to make a living. I understand that you want your value to be appreciated. I do too. It’s what a coach do. I understand. That being said, what happened was from a period of about 2022 to 2025, there was a lot of, I’m just gonna say unhinged pricing advice going around. And it was coming from a place of empowerment. It was like the know your worth movement. And it was like, charge what you’re worth. Look at your overhead expenses, divide it by how many hours you work and that’s your price. What do you need to make? In- include the cost of your lifestyle. And what it did is it, it felt good in the moment and it was just such irresponsible business coaching. There are some people who can do that. It’s about the top 5% of our industry can pull stuff like that off.
The average stylist cannot price themselves that way. And so there was a lot of, “This is what I need to be making or this is what I used to be making or I’ve been in this industry a longtime, this is what I’m gonna charge.” Clients are pushing back. I- if the value is not there for them, they do feel done wrong. Do I think they were done wrong? No. I think that a lot of stylists are just misguided when it comes to pricing and this was the year the pullback and backlash started. What’s the data that supports the pullback? Uh, we’re gonna get into some of that when we go into the 2027 predictions, but I mean, you’ll see the chatter online. Stylists at scale are saying like, “What has happened to the industry? My demand is down. I used to be doing better. Now I’m not doing well.” I think for a long time, stylists and salons were blaming the economy.
And then there has been a wake up in the last few months of like, “Wait a second, that doesn’t check out.” Like it, it doesn’t check out with the fact that some stylists and salons are growing so incredibly fast right now. Like some businesses are exploding. So we can’t just say everybody’s down at scale. It’s simply not true. We have to start looking at the reasons why some are so successful and some are not. And that’s one of the reasons. Number two, I said cost of goods and annual increases are gonna start to phase out. We saw a softening of both. I think a lot of salons are finally moving away from, it’s January 1st, everybody’s getting a price increase. The cost of color went up. We have to pass it along to everybody. You always have to be protecting your margin. I understand that part.
The process is not as simple as my costs went up, the price went up. If we were selling cupcakes or we were selling some kind of like physical item tires, whatever, yeah, the cost of your product goes up, you pass it along to a client, that’s when you’re selling physical goods. We’re selling a service. And, and by the way, in our industry, we’re selling a relationship too. It’s not as cut and dry. It’s just more strategic. And that whole, “Well, we do it because it’s time or we do it because my cost went up,” that started to really flop kind of like we talked about with the unearned price increases, and we are seeing a real pullback of that strategy. Next, I talked about the fixed cost into pricing model backfires. We already talked about that. That’s where a lot of stylists were feeding into this guidance that you just take a look at your overhead expenses, divide it by how much you wanna be making based on the number of hours you’re working and that’s your price.
That flopped real hard and we, we’re watching people undo that in real time. The fourth prediction I said was that whoever has the most online reviews wins. That has never been more true than it is right now. As we look at, um, I’m just gonna say the Meta platform softening platforms like Facebook and Instagram softening, online reviews are where it’s at for 110,000 reasons. It’s where consumers are looking for trusted guidance and advice. It’s what AI is scanning to index different businesses. I mean, when you look at what SEO is like now, SEO is search engine optimization. It is what decides how high you come out in general search, meaning if somebody searched for best stylist in San Carlos, California, you wanna come up at the top if that’s where you work. Google reviews, Yelp reviews, all of that so deeply impact those things now and Google reviews, Yelp reviews are winning at scale.
What I will say is getting reviews on your booking page is nice except for that it’s hitting too low in the marketing funnel. We have other podcasts on that. And when I say reviews, I’m talking specifically Google and Yelp at this time. My fifth prediction, user-generated content wins over self-promotion. Man, if that hasn’t been true all year long, the age of the influencer just continues to get softer and softer and softer. Consumer behavior is showing distrust in people who are just trying to sell stuff. It’s why you don’t see a lot of celebrities taking influencer deals at scales the way they used to. Brands aren’t willing to pay into them. They’re just not as effective as they used to be. When probably even you, when you’re trying to shop for something, you wanna hear a review or feedback or trusted advice from like a regular person and that’s that user-generated content.
So user-generated content for you as a stylist or salon owner is not you saying, “Look at how great Brit’s hair is. I did this.” It’s Brit saying, “I’ve never worked with a better stylist before. This is why I continue to choose CEVA salon. That’s UGC and that’s winning at massive scale right now.” Prediction six. Google Gemini and ChatGPT AI overall are gonna win. I undercalled that. I should’ve emphasized that even harder. Um, I have some data to prove that in a second. Seven, my prediction was that there’s gonna be a big shift back to employment. That was true at scale. And we’re watching a lot of salons that were once rental shift to hybrid. We’re seeing a lot of stylists saying, “I am done doing this myself. I’d like to go back to being an employee.” That doesn’t mean that there’s also employee stylists who are like, “I’m done being an employee.
I’m not gonna work like this anymore. I’m gonna go independent.” But when you talk to a lot of those independents, they’re like, “I wish I could find a great team.” The just the narrative and this ideology that to be successful in this industry, one day you have to be independent, that’s almost like an, a millennial mindset that’s like dying out. There’s just this awakening of like, but there’s great places to be an employee sometimes where you can make more money and have a lot better just work-life balance. There’s just been this awakening to it, and we saw that happen over the last year. Number eight, mentorship programs are in short supply, high demand. That has never been more true. We watched a huge explosion in demand of that this last year. It’s gonna triple down in 2027. I’ll give you some data to prove it.
Prediction number nine, stylists expect owners to supply the clients. That has never been more true. Going back to my prediction of a shift back to employment, yes, shift back to employment, but also stylists are not willing to settle for what was normal in 2004. They’re just not. They’re expecting something different. We’re living in a different world. So if that expectation is met, stylists are really happy and there is this expectation for booth rental stylists and employee based stylists where the salon owner creates the demand. It’s very interesting to me when I say that a lot of salon owners get angry, you generating the demand as the owner is the biggest safe proof you can create in your business. Imagine if I said, “Here’s our business plan. We’re gonna hire a bunch of employees and then whether or not we’re successful is based on them and how hard they’re willing to work.
Let’s do it.” There’s no investor in the world who would invest in that business. We’re just gonna. I’m the owner and we’re just gonna hire the best people we can find and hopefully they’re motivated and if they’re not, we just make no money. That is how so many salons are operating right now versus if the owner is like, “It’s my job to fill the chairs. I’m gonna hire the most amazing people. I’m gonna create an amazing environment. If someone doesn’t play by our rules, they can’t work here anymore, but I’m gonna create the demand because I wanna control the revenue that comes into this spot.” That’s how smart businesses operate. And so I think there’s this awareness now that our industry isn’t such a special snowflake, and if we were to follow like the smart business practices that every other industry follows, the owner will innately make more money.
And so that expectation isn’t a punishment to the owner, it’s a gift. Like if you’re able to generate the demand, you’re able to control the revenue flow. And for me, that’s the massive win. Number 10 is softening of policies. We are starting to see at scale salons rolling back heavy cancellation policies, financial penalties, credit cards on file. And what the result has been is not necessarily a decrease in cancellations, but a significant increase in revenue because the, the find is, sure, you can put up all these gates around your business and say you can’t come in unless you put a credit card down and you agree to this policy and if you cancel too last minute, then I’m gonna charge you and you can do all of that. But there’s gonna be some people who just don’t book because they don’t wanna agree to those terms and then the counterbalance is good, I didn’t want them here anyway.
Well, perfect. Then you’re just gonna have less clients in your salon. That’s fine. But then also, the more people who get burned by that policy and that you charge or you publicly talk about charging, it’s just gonna burn your reputation and scare people away versus if you look like you have an open door, you understand that life happens, are you gonna have cancellations? Yeah, but when we’re looking at the data at scale over the 4,000 something members we’re working with right now, they are making more money overall having less policies. So if the goal is more rules than have a lot of policies, if the goal is more money, just run a more strategic business is the way the results are looking. Number 11, massive disruption in salon retail. We saw a lot of data on this. You can listen back to past episodes on that.
Prediction number 12, more salons going hybrid. At X Club Retreat in May of 2026, we had twice as many hybrid salon on our tables as we did in 2025. So I watched it happen in real time. Number 13, independent education disruption. That was strong. You are watching. I’m sure you’ve seen it. A lot of independent educators get a lot quieter over the last year. It’s just harder. There was a huge independent education boom from 2020 to 2023. It’s just gotten harder to sustain. A lot of salists were burned by weak courses, bad courses, inexperienced educators, not bad people, just they, they weren’t ready to go at it at that scale and it really disrupted the trust of independent education and people are just being a little bit more particular about where they invest. It’s just happening. And then number 14, in-person education resurgence. That has never been more true, especially with the age of AI.
You’re gonna see people saying, “I wanna get off the screen. I wanna get in-person. I wanna have more authenticity,” which is a huge plus for our industry, like sitting in the salon chair. Anybody who’s of the mindset of like people don’t wanna be in salons anymore, they don’t wanna pay money, they’d rather do their hair at home. You have your head in the sand. We are gonna see just a shift at scale in consumer behavior of people wanting to have more in-person experiences, concerts. Have you been to the movie theater lately? There is all of a sudden this surge of people who wanna be in the theater, doing the thing, in-person, festivals, because everyone is so, like, sick of the fake, the rush to being in-person, in-person education, in-person experiences is just going to continue to grow, and you’re gonna see a huge push to, like, let’s get together and have a human interaction.
Okay, so let’s get into the 2027 predictions. Number one, I’m calling the great price correction, and this is in response to basically all of the pricing that mistakes that were made in the industry at scale from about 2022 to 2025 into 2026. 26 was, like, in the year of the awakening, and 2027 is the year of the, like, oh, shit correction of something’s gonna have to change if I’m gonna scale this business because I’m feeling my demand wane, something’s feeling off. So what we’re gonna see is the price correction. I wanna say a few episodes ago. I did a whole podcast episode on how to know when. If you should do a price reduction and how to do it effectively. You can go back and listen to it. If you Google search Thriving Stylist Podcast Price Reduction, it’ll come right up. In that episode, I was like, “I’ve only coached, you know, a dozen or so stylists through price reductions.” I cannot say that anymore.
I, there have been dozens of stylists just in the last few months who have come to me and they’re like, “I did pricing wrong. I’m, I’m screwed. What do I do from here?” Um, and we’re finding stylists who are priced, like, 35% above where they should be. I mean, really risky business models. So what we’re going to see is more stylists walking into a reduction. Now, what I will say is, there’s a couple of ways to do a reduction right and 25 ways to do it wrong. So just because you see a stylist announcing a reduction or whatever, it does not mean that they’re doing it right. Let me tell you an example of doing it wrong. So I’m seeing stylists on Instagram now be like, “Hey, I know times are hard. I love my clients, so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna reduce my prices to make it easier to come see me and more effective for you.
So I’m excited, let’s partner together.” Don’t do that. That, that’s not how we do it. Instead, you wanna be really strategic. You, you won’t find professional businesses that are doing it like that, and that’s not how you navigate it in a way that’s gonna grow forward. What that does is it puts you in a position where you’re always gonna be the low price leader. It is very difficult to build back from there versus doing a price reduction strategically, it’s a temporary reduction so that we can rebuild the momentum, increase the demand, and then go forward from there. So what this is called is the J curve. When you, when you make a price reduction like this, I want you to think of the letter J. So if we’re looking at a J, it has this small arc on one side, that’s where you’re at right now, and then we do the strategic reduction, and we don’t go way down here.
It’s not like a big fat U, it’s truly a J. So it’s a little dip. Strategically, we price you exactly where you need to be, and then kinda like a hockey stick, it goes back up. So a J-curve reduction is what we go for, and that’s what we see when it’s done correctly, is yeah, there’s this little temporary dip where you’re like, “Oh, I hope this is the right thing,” but if you’re doing all the other things we’re supposed to be doing to build our business strategically, the J on the way back up feels really, really nice. And then you’re like, “Okay, this is all worth it.” It’s that free fall in the dip that feels really scary, but if you know that you’re doing it correctly, it works really well. Now, before anybody hears this and is like, “That’s me. I gotta cut my prices.” Please do not.
Instead, what we have to do is do a quick analysis. We have to diagnose, are you overpriced or under-promoted? Some of you are overpriced. Some of you just don’t know what you’re doing when it comes to marketing and demand. And so you could do a price decrease and be like, “Well, this sucks. Nothing changed.” Well, yeah, because you troubleshot for the wrong issue. So you have to diagnose your business first. Is it utilization? Is it demand? Did you used to have stronger demand? Are you actually going all in on marketing? Do you know what your brand is? Like, you have to have a holistic view of your business before you just start flipping switches and pulling triggers. That can be very dangerous. How do we know this works? Zenati Beauty did a really interesting study called the Beauty Budget Breakdown, and they found that 45% of consumers reduced appointment frequency, and 32% downgraded to cheaper versions rather than quitting professional services altogether.
It just triples down this idea that it’s not that clients don’t wanna get their hair done, what they’re seeking in value and worth it has changed. They’re just not willing to settle. We’re gonna talk about that reduction in frequency as well. Let me take a quick break to thank Square for supporting today’s episode. Today’s Square story comes from one of my favorite Thriver Society members, Holly. And what Holly told me is that the feature she loves most with Square is that she can create a link to get paid for a product, a service, literally anything without building out a whole invoice. And I want you to think about how many times a month that would’ve saved you. So maybe you charge extension deposits or you collect payments for a class you’re hosting, or maybe you forgot to charge a client for an add-on service and you didn’t realize it till later.
So right now, to get those funds, you either have to create an invoice or you’ve gotta build out a service ticket for that person, or maybe it’s a Venmo request. Or if we can be honest, sometimes if the cost is low enough, you figure you’ll just eat it because it’s not worth going through all that time and trouble. I want you to imagine a world where you have a link that you can text out and it takes about 60 seconds. And Holly said the best part that she loves is that after the transaction hits, it lands right in the client’s profile, so it’s automatically linked to their record. It’s not floating in a separate app, it’s right there within the rest of the client’s history. So in my business, we’re sending vendors payment requests all the time and building an invoice takes easily 15 minutes, where with Square and a couple of clicks, the payment link is sent and linked to the customer’s profile in a fraction of the time.
So if you’re just getting started or if you’re running a business that deserves better tools than what you’ve got, right now you can get up to $200 off Square Hardware at square.com/go/thriver.
That’s S-Q-U-A-R-E.com/G-O/T-H-R-I-V-E-R. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Prediction number two, a continued softening of the middle market. I found an interesting term on this. It’s called a barbell market. So years ago in 2022, I started talking about what I considered to be the great divide. I didn’t know what else to call it, but I was like, “We’re just seeing this huge shift in consumers where it’s like the haves and the have-nots, but at a scale we’ve never seen before.” Well, at the end of 2025, this term that was much more professional than mine came out, and they started calling this a K-shaped economy, which is the same thing as what I was calling the great divide. The reason there wasn’t a name for it before is because it’s never existed before. This is the first time we’ve been in what’s called a K-shaped economy.
It’s not an unhealthy economy, it’s not a family economy, it’s a unique economy, and it is a deep split of haves and have-nots. And what the data is showing is that those who are in a higher income household are spending the same or more as they were before. Like they’re not feeling the heat, they’re not having an issue, everything is going well, they don’t know what people are talking about. That doesn’t define the majority of the industry or the majority of consumers, but it’s a good chunk. And when you look at financial distribution, it’s a large distribution. They are still very much feeding into all of the trades and revenue is still being spent. Then we have the low income groups who are still kind of where they were at. I was. So when I joined the industry, it was 2007, I remember the economic recession of 2008, ouch.
I mean, that was a real recession. It’s nothing like what was going on right now. And everyone was like, “Ah, the economy.” When you look at what happened to stock and the housing market, it was like devastating. I was broke no matter what. So for me, I was like, “Yeah, I can see people around me are complaining about finances. I’m as better as I’ve ever been because I was at such a low income level already that it’s like I haven’t lost anything because I’ve not really gained anything yet.” So for me, my spending in like 2008, 2009, 10, 11, 12 was what it was going to be. Like I didn’t adjust anything because I was already at this lower income level. That is what’s also happening now. So people who never, like, were kind of comfortable, they were always kind of like, you know, working class and getting by, they’re still there.
Like the, they’re still at the restaurant, nothing has changed. The upper class, still there, nothing’s changed. It’s the middle where there’s the squeeze, and that’s why they’re calling it the barbell, is because it’s those who have, like, kind of made it, we’re kind of coming out ahead, we’re starting to get more comfortable. That’s where the discomfort is, and that market is being forced to choose. So instead of, like, three markets of low, middle, high, what we’re seeing now in this K-shape is low and high. The reason why that’s important is that you, as a stylist and salon owner, more than likely for the next, like, four to six years, this is not short-term, kinda gotta pick a side, being like, “Well, and for everybody, I’m kind of in the middle.” That is gonna be really tough, really tough. You have to sway at least one or another.
That doesn’t mean overprice yourself and choose the expensive one. For some of you, that would be devastating. It doesn’t mean cut your prices, go for the cheap. That’s not a working strategy either, but it means getting to know what target market you’re gonna serve and serving them as effectively as possible. You can still make great money serving either market. Both are great markets. Both have a huge need. Both can be executed really beautifully. You have to have a strategic approach. What is happening is those who are just kind of, like, serving the middle are feeling the pain hard, and that’s not gonna change for several years, so it’s something to keep in mind. Let’s talk about growth of the industry and what it looks like to be a growing stylist. So I did an episode a few weeks back now talking about beauty schools. There is a real potential that beauty schools are gonna lose their federal funding.
I did a huge deep dive on it, so go back to earlier this spring of 2026, and you can kind of hear my take on what’s going on in the beauty industry as far as education is concerned. I did have a little bit of a counter opinion to it. A lot of the noise in the industry about what this looks like, I found to be incredibly false, not fact-based, very emotional, biased, not accurate, just a lot of falsities that I couldn’t source or make sense, to be totally honest. And so when I looked at the facts and the data, the threat to the industry is pretty real. It is unfortunate that a lot of beauty schools, mostly privately-owned beauty schools, were potentially bringing on students that were never gonna be able to pay back their student debt. And because of that, it just became this kind of dangerous cycle that, yeah, there’s a real chance that that level of federal funding is gonna go away, that those high interest, high risk student loans are not gonna be available anymore.
What is gonna happen is the industry is gonna massively shift, and there’s a lot of states that are already making big shifts heading that direction. So what you may or may not know is almost half the states in the US now have either apprenticeship options for salon owners and up and coming stylists, or are starting to roll them out in the next six months. So there is a huge push from states at scale to get apprenticeships in place. This would be such a win for our industry. It makes me so, like, giddy excited. We’ve had apprenticeships in California as long as I’ve been in the industry for, so 20 years, I’m sure, maybe longer, and they work so well when they’re done right. So the pros and cons of apprenticeships, the difference between an apprenticeship and a beauty school program, a beauty school program is often half the required hours or less.
So often an apprenticeship is much longer. That is not a bad thing. That overcomes what a lot of people’s frustration is with beauty schools where it feels like people go through the schooling. Some of them pay 20, $25,000, $30,000 for this education, and they come out the outside and they don’t know hardly anything. An apprenticeship, you don’t see a lot of that. And an apprenticeship, they’re in the program much longer, working under somebody who is certified by their state to be an educator or somebody who’s facilitating this program. Um, you can’t do it willy-nilly, like there’s a whole licensure process to it. And then you’re mentoring somebody for often years under your license. What’s cool about it is you can have that person taking clients quickly, just like you would if you were hiring any assistant who is licensed. And that’s what’s really incredible. Like I have watched deeply profitable apprenticeship programs.
There’s a lot of people who are like, “Well, this is annoying, like, I’m taking on the cost of bringing in this apprentice and I’ve got to pay them hourly.” You are looking at that all wrong. That is now a team member that you can build a clientele for and scale. They’re in the salon, mentorship from the start, you’re teaching them right from the ground up. There’s a lot of really incredible opportunity here. When you look at other trades, that is how a lot of these trades operate, is there’s a little in-classroom portion, but then they do these long-term multi-year apprenticeships and it works really well. And at the end of the apprenticeship, if the person isn’t somebody you wanna work with long-term, that’s fine. They get their license, they go elsewhere. If you like them, they can continue working for you. I think it can be a really great thing.
The reason I bring this up is that the trades are still exploding. I’ve been reporting this for years. We are seeing college enrollments decrease at scale nationally and a shift more towards interest in trades. It’s because of how the workforce has just changed in the last 10 or 20 years. Getting a college degree when I was in high school was like a ticket in your door to, like, a really great opportunity at a Fortune 500 company. All you had to have is a bachelor’s degree, and it was like, “You got the bachelor’s? You’re in.” You get a pretty clutched job. That was 20 years ago. A bachelor’s degree now? I mean, there’s people who are working at department stores and they’re like, “I can’t get a job anywhere else.” It’s just different. The workforce is different. The landscape is different. Versus when you look at the safety and security of trades, it’s just a different game.
And we’re just now starting to see this shift. When you look at the Bureau of Labor and Statistics data, there is expected to be a huge shift into the trades in the next few years. So our industry is not shrinking. It’s still growing based on the data. The way people are getting educated is gonna change. Prediction number four, this is very interesting. I wanna talk about Studio Suites. The data here says a lot. So for years, since probably 2014, 2015, Suites have been the goal for a lot of stylists. It was like, “I’m gonna work here as long as I need to, but at some point I’m gonna want my own place in space.” And they start looking into Studio Suites and they say, “Well, it’s expensive, but one day I’m gonna get there and that’s where I’m heading because it’s this opportunity to be independent, have your own business, do it the way you wanna do it.” A lot of people find that even in rental environments, it’s not what they want.
And it kind of, I think, feels like peace, peace and control. And for some of us, that’s what we want. So Studio Suites became this amazing opportunity. But then there kind of became this slowdown, and it was a feeling, but now there’s data. So what’s interesting is when you look at Studio Suite businesses like Sola or Salons by JC, because they’re franchises, their data is public, so they have to publicly report what’s going on within the franchise. I though this was very interesting. When you look at Salons by JC specifically, expansion has almost stopped when you look at new franchises being opened based on the data being reported. So by the end of 2023. So, or I should say, over the course of 2023, 14 new Salons by JC locations opened up, okay? In 2023, 14 new locations opened their doors. In 2024, 14 new locations opened their doors.
In 2025, two new locations, I mean, dipped dramatically. So when you look at that, it’s like we were opening, we’re opening, we’re opening, now we’ve stalled. Now, we don’t have the 2026 data yet because it’s not the end of 2026, but when you look at Sola, the data is very similar. In Sola, when you look at company-owned locations, they added 22 new locations in 2022, five new locations in 2023, three new locations in 2024. So what’s happening is new Studio Suite locations are not opening at scale. I won’t say the name of this franchise, but there was a. I’m in the San Francisco Bay Area. There was a Studio Suite brand that was set to open a Studio Suite early this year, early in 2026. I had heard buzz about it. Stylists were like, oh, that’ll be cool, that’ll be cool, that’ll be cool. They started getting into the process.
They were having some stylists come in for tours, and then they announced that they just weren’t doing it anymore. I don’t know what happened. They were starting a build out. Like, they had gotten pretty far in the process, and then it was like, “Yeah, no, we’re not doing it anymore.” Something is happening there. When you look at the data being reported, what some of these companies are saying is a big part of the problem is some of the people who chose to open Studio Suites just took on way too much square footage. So what they’re finding is, when you look at smaller Studio Suite buildings, so Studio Suite buildings with an average square footage of 45 6,500 square feet. Those studio suite buildings are still 89% leased. So still not 100% leased. There’s still spots available, but 89% leased. When you look at studio suite buildings that are 8,500 square feet, 78% leased.
So 20 something percent vacancy. What seems to be happening in Studio Suites is the best, most prime locations in NDO Studio Suite Building, people get in there and they don’t move. When you have great natural light, you’ve got a window. Some Studio Suite buildings, the way that they’re set up, they’re in these, like, really great, really walkable areas, and the Studio Suite owner can either get a door or a window right on the street front. It doesn’t even feel like you’re in a tudio suite. It feels like you have your own salon. You get in there and you stay. Like people are not moving, they’re not leaving, they’re expanding if possible. Those are pretty structured. Then when you get into the less desirable units, it’s a heavier rotation. Often they’re smaller, usually they’re interior, they don’t have that natural light, and it’s kind of a bit more of a revolving door.
It’s six-month leases, it’s one-year leases, the retention’s not there. It’s kind of like a passing through, and the demand is just not what it used to be. Now that being said, when you look at overall financial reporting, these Studio Suite businesses are still making a ton of money, they’re still profitable, but the expansion is not there anymore. So occupancy is holding. It’s not that they’re falling flat. The, there’s just not the increased growth and demand that there once was. Prediction number five, let’s talk about AI for a second and what search is gonna look like moving forward. 64% of consumers aged 30 to 44 have asked AI for business recommendations. For consumers 60 and over, it’s 24%. So when you look at that data, that’s, uh, more than half, it’s pretty significant. Where that gets really interesting is that same search data was only 6% in 2025.
So in 2025, only about 6% of human beings had used AI to look for a local small business. Fast forward just one year and now 64% between the ages of 30 and 44 have asked. I mean, that’s radical growth. That’s like explosive growth. That’s like what we saw when the internet was first invented. It’s huge. So when we say looking to AI, it could be Google Gemini, it could be ChatGPT, it could be Claude, it could be a lot of different AI platforms, but this is huge. Like the name of the game is Get Found on AI. We are about to host our second AI training and thriving stylist method. We had one earlier this year hosted by Coach Nine. We have another one coming up in October because it’s so critical and so important. You have to be able to be indexed there and understanding how that game works.
If you have not figured out how to become searchable, like now is the time. The train way left the station. We cannot just rely on social media. We cannot rely on just word of mouth. All of those things are starting to slowly really lose their steam, and so it’s important to modernize forward. Prediction number six, branding and brand messaging is gonna be your superpower. So this is not new information, but it’s becoming such a strong differentiator. So for those of you who have been working on branding and brand messaging for years and you’re like, “I don’t even know if it makes a difference,” 2027 is gonna be your day of reckoning. Like it is going to be the year that the brand really wins. Sounding like everybody else, being basic, being neutral, being a hairstylist, being a hair salon is starting to cause contraction in businesses in very real time.
Clients are looking for salons and stylists who are quick and structured and organized and modern and efficient and with it and branded and positioned properly. Listen to last week’s episode if you need any tips on that. You can’t just shortcut branding. You can’t just show up as somebody who does hair. There has to be a strong point of view. And the brand is not the logo. The brand is a whole energy around the business in which you’re cultivating. I guarantee if I was to say, “Who are your favorite stylists to follow or who are your favorite salons to follow?” They have strong brands. They always do. You might just not be looking at it through that filter. That is what makes the difference. Specificity, specialty when you can, clear messaging, speaking to a target market, all of that is gonna be huge. It’s gonna tie into your AI searchability.
It’s gonna tie into your Google searchability. It’s gonna tie into all of these other parts and pieces. It starts with a solid brand and solid brand messaging. Okay, prediction number seven. And we actually talked about this earlier in the year. The scalp and hair health category is exploding right now and it’s gonna continue to go that way. I think there’s a bajillion different reasons why this is popping off. I found it interesting that searches for the words hair shedding increased by 105% between 2025 and 2026. That’s huge. It means they doubled. 65% of men see noticeable thinning by the age of 35, 40% of women by the age of 50. 95% of first time hair transplant patients are between the ages of 20 to 35. So it’s funny, men getting hair transplants, I grew up in the 90s, so hair club for men was like this thing at the time and it was this commercial where like, who’s doing that?
It seems so nutty. Now, how many stories have you seen of men flying to Turkey to get these amazing hair transplants? And by the way, documenting the experience on social media. It’s not like this thing you do in secret. It’s like, look what I just did and look how cool it was and look how amazing I look now. So I think there’s been a need for these services forever. It’s not like, oh my gosh, a new problem. We’ll talk about GLP-1s in a minute. But it’s not that it’s this new problem, it’s that now we can talk about it. It’s kind of like how perimenopause is this thing that like women can now talk about. Like there’s, we’re just living in this era where like topics that were once so taboo are like, but let’s just talk about it. When you look at postpartum depression, when you look at weight loss drugs, there’s just, there’s just all these things that for so long it was like, but don’t say anything.
Like just keep that to ourselves. Now we’re just like, let’s just like normalize everything. Hair loss, hair shedding, hair replacement. You know what paved the way for it was hair extensions. When I first started getting extensions back in 2007, people thought I was nutty, like, whoa, she has lost her mind. Now it’s like so normal. It’s actually kind of like cool. Like, I want that. It’s just changed. Like the, the tone and the just entire energy around hair loss, hair replacement, hair thinning, scalp issues. I mean, when, like dandruff, like head and shoulders, it was like, oh my gosh, I’m so embarrassed to buy that at the store. Now it’s like people love watching TikTok videos about scalp exfoliation. It’s just become like trendy to take good care of yourself and to recognize a problem and decide you wanna do something about it. Like it, that is just so on brand right now.
And so when we see scalp services, hair thinning, that is going to continue to explode. I found this interesting. Non-invasive scalp care is projected to reach $24 billion by 2032. That’s non-invasive. So that’s not hair plugs or anything like that. That’s non-surgical treatment based. Neutrophil topped $1 billion in annual sales. As we watch the US market specifically, I haven’t done any research in any other markets, candidly, on GLP-1s, but GLP-1s have really rocked the consumer market in the past year or 18 months. Again, that was something that was done in secret for so many years. Now it’s becoming mainstream. And now we’re seeing more peptide talk. Have you guys seen a lot of that where a GLP-1 is a peptide? There are all these other peptides that are about to be FDA approved. They’re going through the process. Like I don’t know what’s gonna happen with that.
It’s not an area I’m an expert in. But as you see that, we don’t know what the side effects are gonna be of other things like that, but something that is coming out is a, is a common side effect of those who do use GLP-1s is hair shedding. And as more people start to use it, that’s not going to go away. There’s gonna be more people looking for solutions, whether it be products or treatments or somebody they can talk to about it. So we’re gonna see that continue to explode. I know a lot of you are getting into scalp services, scalp spas, whether it be more from a tricology standpoint or a therapeutic standpoint, we’re just gonna continue to see that explode. I’m really excited to see where this goes. Just know if you’re already in that space, I encourage you, rather than feeling like comfy cozy and be like, “Oh, I’ve already nailed it there.” Just know the competition’s gonna get stiffer.
So this is your call out to like elevate. We watched this happen in the extension market, so take note. What once was like highly specialized, only a few people did it, you kind of owned your territory, it got saturated so fast and then clients got burned by bad experiences. When you look at the extension artists and the extension brands who held strong, they showed that they were elevated from the stark. That goes back to that strong brand messaging, that strong brand positioning, clearly looking like the expert. And you can’t say years of experience, I have more certifications. Historically, that’s not what consumers base their decisions on. Unfortunately, it comes down to great branding, great messaging. It’s how some people unfortunately get scammed, but you kind of have to play that game and like make sure that if you are the person who’s doing it legitimately and you do have more experience and you are the best choice, make sure it is clear of that so that you are getting those clients and, and giving them an incredible experience.
I’m actually gonna do nine predictions. I just decided on the spot. So prediction number eight is that the name of the game is going to become increasing demand and higher volume of clients versus sustaining frequency. There is nothing we can do about the reality that consumers are changing visit frequency. They’re choosing to come in less frequently. They’re choosing more weeks between their visits. It just is what it is. There’s nothing I can do to change that. But what we can do is increase our demand so that we don’t feel the pain of that frequency reduction. Now, there’s things that we can do, and we talk about this in Thrivers also. There’s many services and maintenance services. That is like anecdotal, like sure. It’s like if you have a headache, take a medication for it. But if you’re somebody who has headaches every single week, you can keep taking medication or you can get to the source of what’s happening there.
Is it low blood sugar? Is it something else underlying? You can keep just throwing something at the symptoms or you can get to the root cause. The root cause is you need more demand. Like if you’re finding more gaps because people are stretching out time between visits, you need more demand. I promise that’s the solution. And we’re not gonna be playing a frequency game for the next couple of years. We’re gonna be playing a demand game. Like the person with the highest demand, most people wanting to come in to see them, the person who is conquering their markets the hardest will win. So that’s what it’s gonna look like next year and beyond. Prediction number nine is a mix of heartbreaking and exciting. We are seeing kind of a generational salon turnover. We’re seeing a lot of salon owners who are like, “I’m done. This is it for me.” It’s a lot of salon owners who open their salons like in the ’90s or when the industry looked very different, even the early 2000s, the industry looked different than it does now, and they did really well then and they’re looking at what has to be done to be a successful salon owner now.
And there’s like, it’s just, I can’t do it. I don’t, I don’t wanna change again. I don’t wanna adapt forward. I understand things have changed. I’ve been trying to do it this way. It’s failing. I just don’t have it in me to adapt again. I just wanna go back to doing hair. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. We’re gonna see a lot of salon owners ready to sell. I’m hoping somebody approaches them offering to buy and opportunity for salons to be invested in by those who are interested and eager to do so. One word of warning on that, what we’re starting to see, it’s gonna be a micro prediction in 2027. I plan to talk about this a lot in 2028 predictions. There are major investors who are now starting to open salons. So historically, our industry has mostly been independent business ownership. There’s some chain salons, right?
Costcutters, super cuts, things like that. Madison Reed, right? Those would be more like franchise locations or multi-locations. We’re seeing something different and it’s big investors with sometimes billions of revenue behind them, oftentimes tens of millions or hundreds of millions saying, “Let’s open an amazing salon.” And they will open a salon, decorate it, source it, fill the space with employees, pay them in a way that would be hard for a local small business salon to compete with. It genuinely scares me. When we look at X Club Retreat 2027, I am bringing in an AI business expert who’s gonna do a half-day workshop to talk to my X-Clubbers about how to basically be offensive and defensive, knowing that that’s the way our industry is shifting and that the competition coming in from the side looks different than it’s ever looked before. We can’t stop that. It is happening.
It’s happening at a small scale right now. Watch for it. You’ll see it in 2027, and when you find it, you’ll send me a DM about it. I know that you will. It’s gonna continue to scale. We as an industry can’t just keep doing how we’re doing and hope that things turn around. They will not turn around. The industry is changing so radically fast. We’re in a season of shift, change, evolution, growth, seriousness, and the result is higher profits, more scalability, more opportunity, better employee retention, better team member retention if you’re a salon owner, so long as you’re willing to play the game. Okay. Those are my 2027 predictions. Would love to know what you think. As I always say, so much love, happy business building. I’ll see you on the next one.
