Faced with increasing pressure to keep up with the online shopping boom, salon-only brands are working harder than ever to drive retail back into salons. Here, bd talks to several brands and distributors about how they’re responding to the changing retail landscape.
Why salon-only?
When asked what constitutes a salon-only product, most brands will cite their active ingredients. The concentration of these actives means only professionally trained therapists are qualified to prescribe them correctly.
is one such brand that subscribes to this reasoning. We have a step-up system,” says brand manager Daphne Walsh. So the levels of vitamin A increase as skin starts to acclimatise to the different levels.” Walsh says all their stockists need to be highly trained to be able to prescribe the range according to its recommended doses.
Catherine Biedermann is the managing director of Advanced Cosmeceuticals, the distributor for salon-only brands including , SkinCeuticals and to name a few. Biedermann says being a salon-only brand is more about ensuring results rather than the potential problems the wrong product could cause to a customer’s skin. The wrong product won’t necessarily cause damage to the skin, but they probably won’t produce the results you’d expect from a cosmeceutical,” she says.
For some brands, stocking in salons is also about the brand value. We feel customers get the best impression of how the brand performs if they can have a facial treatment with a qualified professional,” explains Belinda Hughes, brand manager for .
Former salon-only brand would argue that restricting stockists to salons isn’t essential for maintaining a premium standard. The brand moved into David Jones department stores about 20 years ago and hasn’t looked back. The luxury customer expects a high level of service and information that is facilitated in a department-store environment that offers dedicated staff who are passionate and only work on La Prairie,” says Ai San Chew, marketing and public relations manager for the brand.
To go online, or not?
In one corner, we have those brands that will fight to the death to keep their brand off the online market, while in the other, we have those that are of the if you can’t beat ‘em, join them” philosophy.
Michelle Doherty, director of , is in the latter camp. She says online shopping is here to stay, and it’s up to salons to offer people incentives to continue shopping with them. When salons come on board with us, we set them up with e-commerce on their site free of charge, including all the support that goes with that,” Doherty explains.
Environ, on the other hand, has chosen to avoid the internet altogether as a means to protect their product. The brand’s AVST range is 100 per cent internet protected, so it can’t be purchased anywhere online, according to Walsh. Our stockists are governed by very strict rules, where they’re not even allowed to sell it through their own website,” she explains. Certain product, I believe, shouldn’t be able to be purchased online because of the cause and effect they can have in being misused.”
How has retail been affected?
Michelle Givoni, Australian supplier for , estimates salon retails sales have decreased by 50 per cent in recent years. Matoyla Kollaras, director of Skin Factors, Australian distributor of , agrees. I had a salon owner recently tell me she had to throw out product because it had expired. That’s not only a loss of sale, but a loss of money for clients. That’s how deep the problem can become.”
Biedermann says it’s up to salons to be more proactive to ensure these losses don’t occur. A lot of salon owners get quite distressed about online shopping, and they spend quite a bit of time and energy getting upset about it,” she concedes. What we say is, ‘Look, it’s here and we can’t change it, so spend that energy on something positive and look at ways of increasing your sales by offering treatments and packages that customers have to come in store for.’”
What can we do to protect the industry?
The one thing all brand agree on is that it’s up to them to ensure the therapists are educated and trained to the highest standard, not only in product knowledge, but business and service as well, to keep customers coming back.
Brands these days seem to have been left with no choice but to limit the advice they hand out to consumers for free. Kollaras says that they encourage their stockists to be a bit more reserved with the information they give to consumers, to prevent people taking professional advice and then buying product online anyway. Some of our clients will write down the customer’s prescription, so if they’re interested in purchasing the products, they’ll have to buy it from them,” she reasons.
Isabelle Sennery, training coordinator for Phyt’s says the industry has to protect the industry, but it’s a fine line between looking after salons and keeping the consumer happy. We have an online system called Client Connect, whereby if a customer buys a product online, part of the profit will go back to the salon,” Sennery explains. The salons provide a client with a Client Connect card, so the customer can nominate that salon if they decide to go online.”
How do you think online retailing is affecting the salon retail industry? Whose responsibility is it to protect salons? Share your thoughts with us below.