Hey, listener, I'm Eric Taylor.

So Donovan came to me a few weeks ago and he said, for the last episode of the year,

why don't you wrap up the year with kind of a monologue on the state of the industry. And I thought, oh, God,

like, how could I possibly do that with any accuracy, delivering any sort of value to you guys?

And so I thought about it. I mold. I contemplated. And I had, had you know I started writing something and in the

end I keep coming back to what I think is simply described as a high altitude

perspective of where I find our industry after the 23 years that I've been in it.

I've been fortunate enough to see in those 23 years lots of different things about the industry,

but mostly from a broad vantage point because we've had so many beauty professionals come in and out of Salon Republic

or I mean I've known many beauty professionals for the 23 years that I've had Salon Republic.

So and then we've had some people leave the salon and then come back and then spend years and I get to know them and I see their evolution.

And so so many different little data points here, how could I possibly boil this down?

And so it took me a little bit of time, but this is how I'm going to express it.

In the beauty industry, we have never had as many choices and what we can offer clients as we do today.

Nothing I say for the rest of this episode is as important as that.

There are very few needs, desires, wants from our clients in the general public that we can't satisfy at this point.

Girl on the street. She wants longer eyelashes. We can do it.

Oh, sensitive eyes because she had a problem with the eyelash extensions from five years

ago.

No problem.

We got that.

Another girl on the street.

...