Happy New Year to you all. Is 2018 the year we see our industry enhance itself and move into a positive light, as the Egg Producers did years ago? I know I’ve told this story before, but they overcame negative research and showed there was benefit in using their product in moderation. What can we all do as individuals and as a group?

As an individual, you’ll promote the equipment you use and the benefits for the use of the equipment. You’ll have other equipment than UV to help your clients get the results they want. You’ll show people you care by having industry certified operator and controlling your equipment. You’ll ban skin type 1 (always burn, never tan) people from using a sunbed and show them that cosmetic tanning (spray) is for them. You’ll be a great corporate citizen and follow the provincial regulations, even if you don’t totally agree with them. You’ll hopefully help your local politician get elected in the next provincial election. And most of all, you’ll make sure everyone you talk to about sunbathing is doing it responsibly, whether indoors or outdoors.

Groups are always more powerful than individual, that why associations, co-ops and franchises exist today. This is how the egg producers, as an association, overcame their negative research and the perception of eating eggs. This took decades for them to overcome, but you don’t hear much about the negative any longer. You only hear the message from the egg producers – Get Cracking. Non-Profit association are normally started when the industry is being attacked and fall when businesses think everything is fine, with no media. We must realize that if we don’t promote the positives, and how the risks can be minimized, no one will. People that exaggerate risks to get a point across will believe they can push government to do more and add stricter regulations, which can harm business. The JCTA has made advances with governments on how we protect our clients since the myopic under-18 bans have been put to bed. We can’t stop now. We need to continue to monitor what is being said about our industry, both at a government level and to the media. The JCTA is not only following what is happening here in Canada, we’re monitoring what’s happening around the world with the help of associations in the UK, Europe and the United States. Please continue your support of the JCTA and Smart Tan Canada by becoming a member.

Now that regulations are over, we’ve diverted most of our time and money to marketing the industry. This all started in the 2016/2017 season when, at the peak, we were sending 600 Canadians a day to www.TanResponsibly.ca website to educate them. We thought this was great, but this year’s social media campaign has started off with great success. People are spending more time on the website, and our click rate percentage has quadrupled. The campaign, as I said in the last article, includes PreTan, Lifestyle, Sunburn Prevention and Spray Tan segments. The TanResponsibly website includes a new page on sunburn prevention. The new page is all about doing it right and not sunburning. That the risk is not about moderate exposure, it’s about overexposure. I know this sounds repetitive, but we need to keep telling people our message, and change the perception of UV light. Check this ad out, it just one of the Pretanning campaign ads running right now

The biggest thing that happened last year and we’ll continue to use for years to come is the Kimball research on sunbeds and vitamin D that cost $100K. Yes, we all knew that we made vitamin D, but this research went further; it showed that there were no adverse effects when following exposure schedules, that once you produced a tan you didn’t stop making vitamin D, and that a person once they had a tan they could handle 6 times the exposure of the first session and not sunburn. Plus, this research was not done in a lab; it was done in a typical Canadian salon. This was the first time this had ever been done. We will continue to promote this in social media, to government and to reporters. This research is just a stepping stone to showing Canadian and the world that if a sunbed is properly controlled, the risk is mitigated and the benefit outweighs the risk. We’re already seeing in articles the promotion of the benefits of sunlight again. We now need to show everyone that sunbeds can be used as a surrogate for sunlight. To prove this, we as a group with other groups need to fund research to dig deep into the risks and benefits. Please help us fund the next research at a cost of $250,000. Become a Member

Let’s stick together and build a future built on facts, not on misinformation!