Unpacking the Beauty Industry's Data Challenge: Alain Audet on The Hair Game Podcast

Alain Audet, VP of Sales and Marketing at SalonInteractive, was recently featured on The Hair Game Podcast to discuss the complexities of collecting data in the professional beauty industry and the work behind The Key Industry Metrics (KIM) Report.

Audet detailed his extensive international background, which included an early start as a model for Clairol and formal training as a makeup artist, eventually leading him to launch Kérastase in Canada for L'Oreal. His 25 years in the professional beauty industry led him to focus on data and technology at SalonInteractive.

The core of the podcast discussion centered on The KIM Report, which SalonInteractive created in partnership with several major software platforms, including Square, Rosy, and Phorest. The company gathers and normalizes transactional data from over 10,000 salons monthly to provide a regular pulse on the market for manufacturers, distributors, and salons.

Key takeaways from the report and Alain’s industry observations on the podcast included:

• The Fragmentation Challenge: The industry is highly fragmented, with individual business owners, a multitude of software platforms, and no standardization, as salons create thousands of new service names every week.
• Service Pricing vs. Visits: While the average service price has risen across the industry by about 2.8%, the biggest issue is that clients are visiting salons less often.
• Retail Struggle: Despite technological advancements, the industry continues to struggle with selling retail, a problem that has persisted for decades. Retail sales dollars within the salon walls are down for the third year in a row, with declines of 5–15% in 2025, depending on the salon cohort.

Alain also revealed new and upcoming enhancements to the platform:

• Regionalization Reports: Q2 2026, The KIM Report published the first quarterly report on regionalization, breaking down the country into six regions to analyze the 13 metrics and cohorts against one another and the national average.
• Manufacturer Product Tracking (Future): Manufacturers will eventually be able to track their products to see how specific SKUs perform across salons and salon services.
• KIM Insights Project (Future): This project uses AI to address the challenge of service names, with roughly 3,000 new service names created every week. The goal is to associate new service names with what they are most likely based on and how they appear in the data set.
• Direct Access for Salons (Future): The long-term goal is for salons to access data specific to their cohort (e.g., solos accessing solo data).
• Bridging Online and In-Salon Retail Data (Next Year or Two): The KIM Report aims to bridge the transactional data gap by fostering greater collaboration to correlate salon-level retail sales (which are tracked) with online sales (which are not tracked) via e-commerce platforms, affiliate programs, and distributor/white-label platforms.

To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

For more information about The KIM Report, please visit TheKIMReport.com or reach out HERE.