The Joint Canadian Tanning Association held its Annual General Meeting on Nov 3^rd this year via webinar. Member and Non-Members were welcome to connect live.

After 5 years as president of the JCTA, Mat Rockey stepped down this year. We now have a new JCTA president, Sherri Buckle from Cold Lake, Alberta. Sherri brings lots of experience with her. Sherri is an executive director of the Cold Lake Chamber of Commerce and owns two salons. Sherri and her husband are well connected politically, both provincially and on a federal level. See the MyJCTA section and Sherri will give you some insight about herself. The Board of directors will stay the same this year with the reelection of Sherri Buckle for Prairie Director, Nik Van Hearn for Industry Advocate East and Steven Gilroy for Education Director.

The JCTA had a good year with the help of Industry Advocates all renewing and some increasing their memberships – Sun Evolutions and Sunless Inc. Salon membership also grow with the help of the exclusive JCTA insurance program. Yearend for the JCTA is July 31^st, 2021, and revenue was up by 19%. No surprise on the increase with what happened in 2020. Expenses were also down since the executive director took a pay cut and marketing was turned on and off depending on whether salons were open or not. Every time a province reopened an increased amount of the marketing fund were directed to those provinces, along with marketing the rest of the country. More on marketing later in this article.

The JCTA continue with its mandates set out in 2006. These mandates continue to give the JCTA its direction. The 4 key mandates; Market to Canadians, Educate Governments, Media Relations, keeping our members informed and fund Research & Other likeminded groups. Marketing was different last year, there was no pretan season to speak of, so the JCTA promoted staycations and feeling good. Government education was all about how salons operate, protect clients and being a non-contact service. Some provincial governments listened and allowed salons to open early. Others like Ontario had no interest in hearing from us and every sector in personal services. There were no media relations this year with all the positive information coming out on UV, Sunlight and Vitamin D. The last 2 years has shown all the benefits of sunlight exposure in moderation. Even the dermatologists had very little to say. Keeping members informed was all about making sure everyone knew about wage and rent subsidies, grants, and updated on changing Covid restrictions. I have never read so many government press releases as I have over the last 20 months or so. Supporting other likeminded groups was hard and some campaign and some funding was reduced or put on hold. The Vitamin D Society and GrassrootsHealth continue to promote the UV message along with the Sunlight Institute.

The exclusive insurance program started March 2020, not a great time to start a program – who knew?! This year a representative is now calling salons and doing a 5-minute app over the phone. Salons are seeing the savings and the coverage they’re getting. From what we are hearing cost of insurance is going up across the board, in some cases by 20%. The JCTA program allows us to negotiate premium and coverage. This is done in January and renewed every March. The JCTA loss ratio has been very good this year, so hopefully we don’t see any increases. Everyone should realize that the more salons we have on this program, the more control we have. I encourage everyone to get a quote.

As we have all heard government programs for wage and rent have come to an end. New programs are being introduced in the coming weeks. But this will be for the hardest hit industries. Some of our industry may benefit from these coming programs, especially salons in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta. The JCTA will be following the Bill as it is introduced and gets pasted. At the AGM we gave an overview of what we know now about the new subsidies.

The JCTA Marketing Campaign is now in full swing for the pretan season. Last year would have shown some big numbers if we had not stopped and started our ads. As you can see below, marketing was turned off and on.

But we still had close to 120,000 Canadians visit our Consumer Website – TanResponsibly.ca. And double the number impression our ads got compared to 2019/2020 – almost 10 million impressions. In the peak, the campaign was driving over 2000 people to the website a day. They were being educated and seeing the closest 3 salons near them. Tan Nation Facebook page continue to educate and drive Canadians to TanResponibly.ca. 2021 was supposed to be the year of promoting the UV→D Now Project, which had to be put on hold. Good news, it’s back on in 2022, watch for it!!

The marketing program is back promoting pretanning for October to February. A new ad was developed to help consumer understand how to get a base tan/pretan before going on holidays – 10/2/30 Campaign!! 10 session, every second day, within 30 days before going on holidays. Hopefully they do a few more sessions just for better protection from sunburns. The rest of the campaign will continue with Lifestyle, Sunburn Prevention, and Sunless. The campaign always includes finding the right salon to tan at. Hopefully you’re seeing the JCTA ads in Google; most of the marketing funds are going to Google this year. The more money we have, the more funds are directed to marketing. If you have time check out the carousel ad, we are promoting on the JCTA Facebook page for consumers – Tan Nation. The pretan part of the carousel ad is what we’re using on Google!!

If you would like to become a member, check out this 5-minute video on why you should join this professional association. As always, the JCTA is here to help and protect our industry.

Steven Gilroy, JCTA Executive Director and VP of Smart Tan Canada.