Australia has 40,000 hair and beauty businesses and a handful of trade titles, so is there room for more?

When you lay the Australian professional hair and beauty trade media out on a single page, the whole picture fits on that page pretty comfortably. There are two houses doing the heavy lifting. On one side sits BHA Media, the beauty, hair and aesthetics arm of The Intermedia Group, which publishes INSTYLE for hairdressers, Professional Beauty and SPA+CLINIC for beauty and aesthetics, and Retail Beauty for the counter and pharmacy end of the market, and which also runs Hair Festival at ICC Sydney every winter. SPA+CLINIC has also just launched SCRIPTED, a gated online publication open only to verified AHPRA-registered practitioners, so brands with prescription products finally have a compliant place to talk to the cosmetic doctors, dermatologists, nurses and dentists who use them. On the other side sits Mocha Group, Linda Woodhead's business, which has spent around twenty years publishing Hair Biz, Beauty Biz and Barbershop magazine and owns the awards platforms most of the industry dresses up for, including the Australian Hair Industry Awards, the Australian Beauty Industry Awards and the Australian Modern Barber Awards. Alongside them sits M Division, David Mannah's business, which publishes The Journal for the hair fashion end of the industry and runs the Australian Hair Fashion Awards, and on the medical side of aesthetics there is Aesthetic Medical Practitioner, which Prime Creative Media bought from Bella Media together with the COSMEDICON conference and CosBeauty. Beyond those four the map pretty much runs out.

None of this is a criticism of those titles. Professional Beauty celebrated thirty years last year and reports a network of more than 56,000 professionals, INSTYLE has been landing in salons for more than thirty-five years, and the people who edit these magazines know this industry intimately and care about it a great deal.

The question I keep coming back to is a structural one, and it comes from the brand side of the desk, where I spent ten years of my career and where most of my clients still sit.

If I take beauty on its own, the picture becomes pretty stark, because beauty in this country is really a dozen industries sharing one name. It takes in dermal clinics running lasers and skin needling, cosmetic injectors working under a medical framework, lash and brow artists, nail technicians, waxing and tanning specialists, day spas and retreats, mobile therapists, and the woman running a single treatment room out of a converted garage in the outer suburbs. A brand selling into any one of those segments realistically has Professional Beauty and SPA+CLINIC on the Intermedia side and Beauty Biz on the Mocha side, with Aesthetic Medical Practitioner and SCRIPTED added but only if it sells to injectors and cosmetic doctors, and that is the whole of its paid trade media plan.

There are around 40,000 hair and beauty businesses in Australia, and most of them are very small. ATO data published through Jobs and Skills Australia shows that 71 per cent of hairdressing and barbering businesses are sole traders, and close to half of all hairdressers now work as self-employed. I am not convinced that each of those 40,000 owners opens one of these magazines and sees herself on the page. The lash artist in Ballarat, the barber in Parramatta, the paramedical clinic owner in Perth and the nail technician renting a chair on the Gold Coast are all reading about the same awards nights, the same handful of hero salons and the same brands that bought the double-page spread, and that happens without anyone doing anything wrong. A trade magazine is funded by its advertisers, so it is naturally built around the brands that can afford to be in it, and an awards platform is funded by entry fees and sponsorship, so it naturally celebrates the businesses with the time and budget to enter.

From a marketing perspective, that concentration has real consequences for brands. When there are only a few places to buy trade attention, the publishers hold the pricing power, and every brand in a category ends up in the same issue, on the same sponsor wall and at the same festival, saying broadly similar things to the same readers. Share of voice becomes a question of who has the biggest budget rather than who has the most interesting thing to say, and the smaller and newer brands (which are very often the most interesting) are priced out of the conversation before they have had a chance to join it. It also means that a brand wanting to speak to nail technicians specifically, or to lash and brow artists specifically, has no dedicated trade channel in which to do it, so it either pays for a broad audience it does not need or it skips trade media altogether.

Skipping it is exactly what has been happening. The appetite for segment-specific media has not gone anywhere simply because nobody publishes it, and it has moved to places we do not usually call media. Lash artists learn from other lash artists on Instagram and TikTok, injectors swap notes in closed Facebook groups and WhatsApp chats, barbers follow barbers, and a brand educator with a strong following can now do more to move product than most print placements. That is a trade media of sorts, but it is unedited and unmeasured, it is owned by the platforms rather than by the industry, and for a brand it is far harder to plan and evaluate than a page in a magazine.

So is there an allowance for more? My honest answer is that there is room for more, and that it probably does not look like another glossy title. The advertising market as it is currently funded may well be about the right size for what we already have, because professional beauty marketing budgets are pretty modest and a large share of brands are distributor-led, spending on co-op terms with very little left over for media. The readership is a different story, because 40,000 businesses spread across that many specialisms is a readership that is badly underserved at the segment level. Aesthetic Medical Practitioner is a good example of what a vertical title looks like once a segment is big enough to fund one, and the launch of SCRIPTED shows that the big houses can see the same opportunity when the money is there. It is telling that the medical end of aesthetics, where the budgets are largest and the rules on advertising prescription products are tightest, is the only part of beauty that now has two dedicated channels of its own. The gaps I see are in vertical depth (a proper publication for nail professionals and for the lash and brow category) and in business intelligence, meaning the data and commercial analysis that owners and brands need to make decisions and that almost nobody in our industry publishes.

What makes that kind of media interesting is that it gets built audience first and advertisers second, which is the reverse of how trade publishing has traditionally worked in Australia. Newsletters, podcasts, research reports and member communities can be started by one credible person with a laptop and a point of view, and the ones that earn trust within a segment will find that brands follow their readers there. That is the bet we have made at Inside Industry with Intelligence, and I would truly love to see more people make it in the categories we do not cover, because a brand marketer with five good places to reach nail technicians is in a far better position than one with none.

What we have is enough for the industry as it advertises today, and it is nowhere near enough for the industry as it actually works. Our businesses are already more specialised and more independent than the media that covers them, and the brands that understand that first will stop asking which of the few titles to appear in and start asking where their specific customer is truly paying attention.