I'm sure by now that, as a salon owner and manager, you are familiar with the term diversion and how it affects your salon.
 Brett Vinovich |
Products continue to be sold at an alarmingly high rate outside of their intended channel of distribution: professional beauty salons. It happens when manufacturers and distributors sell to unauthorized persons or sell more products to a salon than it legitimately needs. It happens when collectors establish relationships with salon owners, ask them to order more products than they need and then persuade them to resell the excess inventory at a small percentage over cost. And it happens when mass diverters purchase products from collectors, deface the tracking codes to make them untraceable and unload them on unsuspecting consumers.
Diversion continues to be a tough challenge for the professional beauty business. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Companies continue to fight back through non-diversion agreements with salons and distributors, product tracking, investigations and audits, legal avenues and business terminations.
In this issue, you will find American Salon's fourth annual eye on diversion ("Special Report: Diversion"). We take an insightful look at the good, the bad and the ugly. What can you do? Take action if you spot professional beauty products in a drugstore, grocery store or mass-merchandiser. Report any person or business you see diverting a product.
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We hope that, through these pages, you will see that every one of us can make a difference in this fight to protect the brand value of our professional products.
—Brett Vinovich, publisher American Salon E-mail Brett at [email protected]