The elephant on the expo floor

Ten replies where there are usually sixty, and a fortnight to go until the biggest weekend on the professional beauty calendar. We should probably talk about how everyone's actually going.

Last week I put a fairly ordinary question on my stories, just asking how everyone was going, and the response told me considerably more than the answers did. A story like that usually pulls sixty-odd replies, and I know that number because I've been asking versions of the same question for years and the rate is boringly consistent. Last week it pulled ten, or eleven if I'm being generous with myself.

I don't think that's an algorithm problem, and I've thought about it a lot since, because there are really only two kinds of people who leave a question like that sitting unanswered. The first is heads down, bum up, blinkers on, doing everything they can to make the month work and with no spare capacity to type a reply about it. The second is exhausted and quietly scanning the horizon for a life raft, which isn't something anyone particularly wants to put in writing to a person they've never met. Neither of those describes a sector in rude health, and we're now a fortnight out from the biggest weekend of our year.

The numbers and the feeling don't match, and that's the problem

What's been bothering me is that the data and the mood are telling completely different stories. When we pulled the State of Professional Beauty figures for the first half of this year, what came back wasn't collapse at all: Australian hairdressing and beauty services revenue sits at roughly $12.4 billion, with IBISWorld forecasting a 0.3 per cent dip this financial year, which describes a market holding fairly steady rather than one falling off a cliff.

The pressure isn't in the size of the pool so much as in how many of us are swimming in it. There are now more than 40,000 businesses in this market and that number has been growing close to three times faster than the market itself, so once you add the 4.75 per cent award wage rise that landed on 1 July, you have the real shape of the thing, which is the same money split more ways and costing more to earn.

I wrote at the time that the industry isn't shrinking so much as being redistributed, and I stand by that, but I've since realised something uncomfortable about the phrase, which is that redistribution feels exactly like decline when you happen to be on the losing side of it. Telling someone whose column is down twenty per cent that the category is technically flat isn't the reassurance I thought I was offering. So both things are true at once, in that the data says the market is holding while the room says people are tired, and the gap between those two is the elephant that's going to be wandering around the ICC in a fortnight while everybody talks about lash trends.

So what are we all actually hoping for?

This is the question I keep turning over without ever quite landing it. Are we walking into expo genuinely believing that one weekend in Darling Harbour reverses a soft twelve months, or are we hoping that someone in the Business of Beauty sessions says the one thing that unlocks it, whether that turns out to be a pricing model, a retention play or an outright miracle? Or is this quietly the weekend where a lot of people decide something much bigger about whether to keep going, whether to rebrand, whether to sell, or whether to get out of it altogether? My suspicion is that all three are happening at once, standing in the same aisle and holding the same tote bag.

I don't think expectation is the enemy here, though I do think unexamined expectation is, because there's a version of this weekend where you spend two days consuming sessions and samples and small talk and leave with a full bag and a vague sense of having been busy, and there's another version where you walk in knowing precisely what you need the weekend to do for you. It's the same floor and the same ticket, with wildly different outcomes waiting at the end of it.

Expo itself has changed shape

The part I'm genuinely optimistic about, and I don't think this is delusional, is what expo has been turning into. Watching how the last few years have played out, this looks like the biggest and best-formatted show we've had, with more than 150 brands on the floor, 800-plus products and 60-plus education sessions across the two days, although the more interesting shift isn't inside the hall at all so much as around it.

The legacy brands are increasingly activating around the weekend rather than only on it, with events, dinners, awards and invite-onlys all anchored to the simple fact that the entire industry happens to be in one city at one time. Meanwhile the exhibitor floor has more start-ups on it than I can remember, which is to say brands two years old with a stand, a founder standing behind it and something to prove.

If that trend holds, and I suspect it will, expo ends up becoming two quite different things at once. For new brands entering the market it becomes the discovery platform, because it's the single most efficient weekend of the year to get in front of thousands of people who buy professional product for a living, and there's no cheaper way to find out whether the market actually wants what you've built. For the legacy brands, the floor is no longer where the advantage sits at all, because their advantage is community and advocacy, by which I mean the rooms they can convene, the people they can champion, the standards they can hold and the industry conversations that only they have the weight to start. That isn't a demotion for legacy so much as the harder and considerably more valuable job, and it's arguably where they should have been all along.

The question I'd ask yourself before Saturday week

I'm not going to hand you a checklist, because I don't think the problem is that people are underprepared so much as that they're unclear about what they're there for. The more useful exercise is working out what single thing has to be true by 5pm on Sunday for the weekend to have been worth it, and I do mean one thing rather than five.

It might be a supplier you've been meaning to move away from for a year, or a category you've been circling for eight months without ever quite committing to it, or three conversations with people who have already solved the thing you're currently stuck on, or a decision about whether the business you have is the business you want to be running in 2027. And then there's the harder version of that question, which is the one I'd want asked of me: if your honest answer is that you don't know, is the right move to walk the floor anyway and hope it comes to you, or to sit down with someone this week and work out what you're actually trying to solve before you get there?

I'll be there, and I'll report back

We'll be on stand D135 with five brands I believe in, and I'll be spending a good deal of the weekend walking the floor asking people how they're really going, because that question tends to get a far more honest answer face to face than it ever does in a story reply box.

As always, I'm here with fewer answers and rather more questions, but I'd much rather we walked into the biggest weekend of the year with the elephant named than spent two days pretending the room feels the way it did five years ago.

So do tell me I'm wrong. Reply and tell me the last six months have been wonderful and I'll happily eat this entire article, and if they haven't been, I'd very much like to hear that too, because ten replies is a data point whereas sixty would be a conversation. See you at Darling Harbour.