Market Overview

The market size of professional use cosmetics for hair salons and barber shops attained 153,800 million yen for FY2022, 104% of the previous fiscal year, based on the shipment value at manufacturers. Owing to the ease of activity restrictions including so-called 'quasi-emergency coronavirus measures' that requested people to stay home to avoid infections, the number of customers and visit frequency have recovered.

Considering the fact that the lifestyle to avoid spread of infections by wearing face masks in crowded places and poorly ventilated closed spaces, as well as refraining from going out, is likely to continue, environment surrounding the market may not go back to that of the pre-pandemic period. Still, the demand for hair salons and barber shops is increasing, chiefly for hair coloring, and the sales of salon exclusive products at salons or e-commerce channels are also growing steadily.

Noteworthy Topics

Manufacturers' Strategy to Manage Rising Raw Material Costs

Affected by the soaring market prices of ingredients that are widely used in cosmetics against the backdrop of global demand expansion, revisions of product prices have been observed several times in the domestic market. Despite their efforts for years to address raw material price hike by finding ways to mitigate their expenses, some of the domestic manufacturers of hair salons and barber shops cosmetics ended up revising the prices from latter half of 2022, due to significant increase in the cost of packaging materials, energy, logistics, and human resources.

Quite a few companies have confirmed that they have intentions to revise their prices in FY2023 and beyond for new brands, new products, and for existing brands that are to be renewed. Still, there are also a number of makers that have cautious attitudes toward price revision for the fear of losing market share to domestic and foreign competitors.

To mitigate the impact of price revisions, the cosmetics manufacturers are required to bring forward customer retention ideas for hair salons and barbers, as well as to focus on sales activities which would have a ripple effect on increase of sales per customer and higher salary of salon staffs.

Future Outlook

Taking into consideration the return of pre-pandemic lifestyle led by the government decision to downgrade COVID-19's category to Class 5 Infectious Disease, as well as the price revisions of professional use cosmetics that are planned out for 2023, the hair salon and barber shop cosmetics market is forecasted to expand for FY2023. However, since the consumer spending will be split into a wide variety of entertainment and hobbies including leisure and fashion, on top of structural issues of population decline, the market may turn for the worse thereafter.

Research Outline