Gina Kay reports from Manchester on the 2026 edition of HairCon and finds a show that is definitely putting on the style.
There’s a moment at most trade shows where you look around and think: this could be anywhere. Same floor plan. Same shell schemes. Same coffee. HairCon was not that show.
The venue was the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester, a raw, industrial venue more well known for its music shows than trade shows. HairCon is three years in and already rewriting what a B2B event in the creative sector can look like. I took along to the June 2026 edition a target attendee (my mum), who’s been a hairdresser for the past 30 years and owns her own salon, to give me an extra pair of expert eyes. I caught up with one of the show founders, Michael Dynan, at the end of a busy two days.
Dynan has been in the industry for over 20 years and has seen enough trade shows to know what isn’t working anymore.
“A lot of floor plans look the same. A lot of buildings look the same. I don’t think they’ve evolved enough to keep up with the top brands.”
In hair and barbering, that gap was impossible to ignore. The big creative brands aren’t as interested in a traditional trade show format – it simply wasn’t how they promoted themselves.
HairCon was the answer.
The venue is the strategy
Choosing the O2 Victoria Warehouse wasn’t just an aesthetic decision, it was a commercial one.
“The building adds soul to the event,” Dynan explained. “The walls, the pillars, the lighting, it’s all there. Brands don’t have to spend millions creating an atmosphere. They can keep their costs down and focus on their activation.”
The result was a floor where brands showed up differently, where education spaces didn’t look like seminar rooms. The main theatre wouldn’t have looked out of place at a fashion week. The main stage, doubled in size this year to 200 square metres, hosted what Dynan described as full fashion-week level production.
“Some of the biggest names in the world are doing their biggest show of the year on that stage. The production has to match it,” he said.
The Fresha deal: a masterclass in partnership
Four months ago, HairCon announced a five-year headline partnership with Fresha, the booking and payments platform that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. For most shows, landing a partner at that level takes years. For HairCon, it took a phone call.
“I was doing a show in India. The CEO called me out of the blue, said he’d heard about the event and it was exactly what he was looking for. I flew back on the Tuesday morning. We had dinner Tuesday evening and did the deal,” Dynan recalled.
It’s the kind of story that sounds too good to be true, except it isn’t. And it says something important about what HairCon has built. When the right show finds the right partner, the conversation moves fast.
Rethinking the exhibitor relationship
HairCon doesn’t sell by the square metre. Exhibitors are more like partners. Commitment is to a package that includes stage time, marketing benefits, database access and fortnightly team meetings throughout the year.
“We don’t work with 500 brands. We work with a much smaller, tighter group, a lot more closely. They see us as an extension of their team,” Dynan noted.
The results spoke for themselves. More than half of exhibitors at this year’s show had already signed up to return before they’d even packed down their stands.
Making dwell time a metric that matters
One of HairCon’s most quietly radical moves was its approach to dwell time. Fifty per cent of ticket sales were two-day passes. Visitors weren’t dropping in, but staying, growing, and leaving with a lot more than they came with. The dwell time, you might say, had serious volume.
“It’s like a festival. There’s your main stage, like the pyramid stage. But when you turn the corner, there’s a little acoustic stage. And then the party goes on into the evening,” Dynan explained.
It’s a model that changes the commercial dynamic entirely. Brands aren’t fighting for a 30-second window of attention. They’re building relationships across a weekend.
What’s next
The Assembly, the company behind HairCon, has been quietly building more than just a portfolio. It has recently acquired the industry magazine Creative HEAD, complete with its long-running Salon Smart conference and its Most Wanted and IT List Awards, held at Drumsheds with £4m worth of lighting. A new barber-focused title to reach an audience the hair show was already attracting.
“All of a sudden we’ve gone from having one trade show to this whole portfolio,” Dynan said. “And they’re all feeding into each other.”
With HairCon growing, a landmark sponsorship in place and an expanding media business behind it, The Assembly is doing something rare in the events industry: building something with genuine cultural currency.
The aisles were packed. The brands were happy. And somewhere in the crowd, a hairdresser who’d been working alone in a one-person salon found her inspiration again.
