Beauty Store Business

APR 2014

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50 April 2014 | beautystorebusiness.com social-media spaces—by buying ads or using Facebook for competitions and contests to attract consumers to our sites. It's been extremely successful. We see social media as the new word of mouth in our business. It's a new way to spread recommendations through a very effective group of bloggers and interested consumers that gives you feedback on products. We've been using CurlBox to sample products and a variety of bloggers to educate on how the product works and the benefits, which in turn they show their audiences. How can beauty stores increase their own success with the multicultural market? I think beauty supplies should also use bloggers to bring traffic into the store. We're trying to facilitate this by sending bloggers into specific stores and having them talk about the products on the shelf, especially with new introductions, to let people know where consumers can find them and get some excite- ment that's visual to get word of mouth going. I think that's an untapped ability, and every city has an influential blog- ger or person who can create word of mouth through this kind of in-store awareness-building program. There's a huge opportunity in developing the skills and expertise to find out how that can be done at the store level. Even QR codes can educate consumers. We're begin- ning to sell displays with QR codes so the consumer can go to the store and get information about the product without needing a brochure. They can read about the product or see videos on how to use the product right on their phones. Do you also sell your products through online beauty retailers? We welcome the ability of our products to be sold online as more consumers find it more convenient. At this point, we aren't aggressively trying to sell online, but we do have our products available with some online companies. Our focus has always been retail. The customer that we're tar- geting is very interested in seeing or touching the product before she buys for the first time. But after there is trial and usage, she might buy again online instead of going back to the store. Is the Latina market part of your base? What trends do you see among this growing demographic? The Latina market is definitely part of our base. The trends we're seeing are similar—versatility and the desire for natural products. We tend to have great distribution in major cities, where Latina and African-American customers come in to the same stores. There is a lot of prom- ise for products that offer more versatility, shine, and prevention or repair of damage. How does the international multicultural marketplace differ from that of the United States? I think there is a tremendous difference, depending on the part of the world. Europe is a lot more similar to the United States in terms of trends. They're adopting natural hair care much more than, for example, Africa. In Africa, the relaxing of hair is still extremely popular and on a growth trend, whereas in the United States the relaxing of hair is on a slight decline in favor of natural hair care. In Africa, the growth con- tinues to be in relaxing hair. Some of our brands are very strong in Africa, whereas others are very strong in the United States, so we have a pretty good balance in the way we do business right now. Also, inter- national is growing a lot faster than the U.S. market. The U.S. market is growing at 2% to 3%, but internationally there is a 25% or 30% growth for us. We have distributors in about 25 countries in Africa. Some of them are just beginning, and some have been doing business with us for years. They're at different levels and stages of development. They don't carry all 10 brands—rarely do they carry more than two or three. How will you continue to serve your market in the future? The future of our business is finding solu- tions for greater styling versatility. We are at the forefront of greater versatility and greater manageability, and those are the products women are seeking. I would say the vast majority of our business is consumer. One of our brands, ElastaQP, has had a professional follow- ing for many years because it began as a professional brand, and we do offer larger sizes of those products for salons and stylists. We'll continue to go to stylist T h e M u l t i c u l t u r a l H a i r c a r e M a e s t r o . i n d d 5 0 The Multicultural Haircare Maestro.indd 50 3 / 5 / 1 4 1 : 4 1 P M 3/5/14 1:41 PM

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