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For over 30 years Tim Binnington worked tirelessly as part of a team that grew the Headmasters group to a staggering 56 salons – one of the UK’s biggest – with a combined turnover of £32 million. Nobody would have batted an eyelid if he’d shown up for work one day and announced he was going to golf his way through retirement. Instead, in 2024 he’s busier than ever running a completely different business – the Manta, a revolutionary hairbrush that aims to stop breakage while boosting shine.
The Manta came about in 2014 when Tim’s wife Dani was suffering from a life-threatening illness that caused her hair to fall out. As it started to grow back Tim saw how ordinary brushes caused pain and breakage. Dani could only bear to use her fingers as a comb, and that’s when Tim got the idea.
Creating a hairbrush that was as gentle as running your fingers through hair was the goal, but it also needed to protect and stimulate hair growth, working with hair and not against it. “If you brush your hair with your fingers, and you come up against a knot you don’t just yank it – you put a pin in the knot and give it a little wiggle to loosen it. That was my eureka moment,” says Tim. So began a labour of love that, 10 years and £600k of their own money down the line, he and Dani are still completely absorbed in.
Tim Binnnington
“It took almost five years just to develop the Manta,” says Tim, who now is something of an expert on how brushes are manufactured (want to know the difference between a single shot mould and a twin-shot overmould? Tim’s your man). “I needed it to be totally flexible, quite unlike anything else on the market, and it had to be made of materials that feel really good on the skin.” Guess where he found what he was looking for. That’s right, the adult toy world.
“I know, I know,” he laughs. “But I wanted the experience of massing your scalp or brushing your hair to be sensual and enjoyable, because from my years as a hairdresser I knew that what people love most is getting their hair washed. Traditional brush manufacturers couldn’t help me, so I ended up at Love Honey, where I found materials that were sensual, hypoallergenic, heat-resistant, durable, easy to clean and – even though you don’t need this in an adult toy –anti-static too. So, basically, everything I needed.”
When the Manta eventually launched in June 2018, it looked unlike anything else on the market. Its Flexguard technology, where each bristle sits on its own base and moves 360 degrees independently through the hair, was so unique it was patented. It sits comfortably in the palm of your hand so you can move and manipulate the brush as you see fit, following the contours of your head and allowing the bristles to glide along and not pull on the hair.
“When we launched, we had such a great reaction from salons,” says Tim, “and they are really important to us were originally going to be our main retail outlets. But as soon as it started moving, we had Covid and as everything shut down, we had to pivot online and focus more on the consumer.”
Fortunately for Tim, something else that came out of Covid was thinning hair, and a newfound consumer awareness of the importance of hair and scalp health. Good news for for Manta sales, surely, as the brush has the added benefit of gently exfoliating the scalp, creating a flake-free, product buildup-free, healthier scalp, which is perfect for hair growth.
“Absolutely,” says Tim. “Everyone is more aware and we are in more demand. We’re launching in Boots this year, in a healthy hair and scalp section. We’re sold on 15 airlines but we’ve just launched on Emirates Airlines as well because they’ve recently introduced a healthy hair and scalp section. And we sell in places like South Korea and Japan, where they’ve always been into scalp health.” A key promotional channel has been QVC, both in the UK and the US, as that’s where Tim gets to actually demonstrate Manta’s point of difference from competitors such as Tangle Teezer and WetBrush.
The Manta flexes to the contours of the head, reducing breakage.
Did someone mention Tangle Teezer? When creator Shaun Pulfrey appeared on Dragons Den in 2007, he was famously rejected by the Dragons who told him hjis brush to detangle knotty hair was “a waste of time” (Pulfrey subsequently sold a majority state in his business for £70 million). Earlier this year, Tim and his wife Dani also walked out of the Dragons Den empty-handed – not because they didn’t receive investment offers, but because they turned them down.
The duo had asked for a £240,000 investment for four per cent of their company. Three Dragons – Peter Jones, Sara Davies and Touker Souleyman – were interested, but they all wanted far more equity than Tim and Dani were prepared to sacrifice.
“We valued the business a lot higher than the Dragons would, but our experience in the Den made us realise the extent of the value of our business,” says Tim. “There are millions of people who are suffering with hair breakage and thinning hair, which Manta can help. Sadly, the Dragons were more interested in the money than solving the problem.”
The Manta family continues to grow.
With the bit clearly between his teeth, Tim continues to innovate. Alongside the original Manta, there’s now a Manta incorporating a mirror for on-the-go touch-ups and a pulsating version, known as Pulse, that uses vibration either to invigorate hair and scalp, or relieve stress and tension. And the newest addition is the Manta Kinks, Coils and Curls, especially developed for the unique needs of 3a to 4c curly hair. Together, the Manta family has won almost 40 awards – including Creative HEAD’s Most Wanted Award for Innovation in 2020 – and as a nod to where the journey originally began, Manta have donated almost 8,000 brushes over the years to The Little Princess Trust, a charity supplying real hair wigs, free of charge, to children who have lost their own hair due to cancer treatment or other conditions.
“If you brush your hair with your fingers, and you come up against a knot you don’t just yank it – you put a pin in the knot and give it a little wiggle to loosen it. That was my eureka moment.”
“The business is doing well,” says Tim, who still squeezes in one day a week at Headmasters, and who credits a lot of Manta’s success to the team who work with him. “We have got our original investment back, but to be honest I didn’t go into it to make money – it’s only ever been about helping people. My goal is to get more and more people changing the way they brush their hair. And even if they say, ‘I’ll never use a Manta, but I’m going to mindfully brush my hair and be careful with my scalp,’ we will have achieved something. Because when a woman gets to 60, 70 or 80 she will have better hair, and that will make her feel better about herself and have more confidence. And the better you feel, the better you are to others, so it makes the world a better place.”
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Yolanda Cooper
It was when she was at an airport in 2016 that Yolanda Cooper had her idea for her electrical tool, the SupernovaPRO. She was checking in for a flight with overweight baggage, mainly because of the number of different hair tools she was travelling with. ‘There’s got to be an answer for this’, she thought. It turned out there was. And it’s a game-changer.
The SupernovaPRO is the world’s first three-in-one hair styler combining a fully functioning straightening iron, curling tong and wave wand in one ultra-sleek, beautiful-to-behold tool. It comes with a whole host of first-to-market patented features, including revolutionary SmartSwitch technology that makes it the only hot styling tool with three independently powered functions; premium grade ceramic plates infused with Trionic technology that softens, smooths and hydrates the hair; and a patent-pending ergonomic DoublePivot system, which relieves pressure on the median nerve to reduce the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome – a condition especially prevalent in pro stylists.
The SupernovaPRO tool
Not bad for a young female entrepreneur from Belfast designing her first electrical tool! “I think going in blind to something allows you to be completely free of fear,” says Yolanda. “If you knew what you were getting into before you did these crazy things, half the time you wouldn’t do it because you’ve no idea how complex it is, how long these things take and how many reasons there are for it to fail. Some of the best entrepreneurs are the ones who just have no clue what they’re doing, they just go into it and commit to figuring it out later.”
Armed only with a sketch of what she felt the tool could look like, Yolanda set about hiring industry-leading industrial designers and engineers to turn her concept into a reality. It took five years to refine the tool mechanically and aesthetically as she constantly challenged her team to come up with the technology to match her ideas.
Yolanda Cooper
“Very early on we realised that if this is going to be a professional tool, then three-in-one is brilliant but it can’t be a compromised experience – we have to make each of those tools incrementally better than what’s on the market,” says Yolanda. And I think I think that’s what we’ve done. So, straighteners have always been symmetrical and rectangular, but what if you need to get right into the baby hairs at the root? We made our straightener narrower at the tip, so that it allows you – for example – to detail short fringes and work with Type 3 and 4 hair. Ceramic technology provides great negative ions into the hair, but how do we take that even further? I’m a trichologist, so that’s why I came up with the idea of taking a heat protection formula and infusing it into the plates to give superior shine. When it came to the tong, we changed the tip to a rubber material so that you can literally hold onto it, even when the temperature is set at 200˚C. And we spent a long time perfecting the exact torsion of the spring and the double-pivot system to make the tool more comfortable to use. Consumers might not notice that benefit, because they’re only going to use the tool for 20 minutes at a time, but hair pros, who are styling nine hours a day – they’re really going to see the difference.”
Yolanda Cooper
Proud that the SupernovaPRO is designed, engineered and manufactured in Great Britain, and fully aware that she is competing against some industry heavyweights, Yolanda is putting her experience as a former marketing director to good use. “Core to our communication and marketing strategy is a grassroots approach,” she says. “We have a programme called The Salon Spotlight, where we send our film crew into a salon to shoot collaborative content, including interviews with the stylists and footage of them styling their client’s hair in different ways. We can also create an event in the salon, where I and our head of engineering will come along and talk to guests. And the content we create can be used for a salon’s own social media campaign to drive awareness. We may not have the budgets that some of the big brands have, but what we do have is passion and agility and the desire to go and partner with salons on a one-to-one basis.”
And finally, why the name Supernova? “I’ve always been fascinated with astrology and stargazing,” says Yolanda. “And with SupernovaPRO we’re trying to create the biggest shining star in the industry. In space, a supernova is a cataclysmic explosion. And so I thought that was a cool name, because we are aiming to be the biggest thing in the industry. It’s quite fitting.”
Retailing at £299, SupernovaPRO is exclusive to salons across the UK and Ireland. To become a stockist or purchase at the wholesale price of £199 plus VAT, visit supernovahairtools.com/pages/creativehead
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Thought about your colour bar lately? It’s where your colourists mix the concoctions that command some of the highest charges on your treatment menu, but it’s also where your business haemorrhages money, too. Salon owners estimate that at least 40 per cent of the colour they buy goes to waste. And that’s why Francisco Gimenez has been thinking about your colour bar too.
The Mexico City-born tech entrepreneur is the brains behind the Yuv Lab, billed as the first smart, bespoke hair colour lab for salons and freelance colourists, looking to streamline and automate the colour formula process dramatically to reduce waste and costs while making clients happier.
Gimenez, whose engineering background predisposes him to problem-solving “I’ve been called a disruptor, but I have never set out deliberately to challenge things,” he says), had spent years thinking about and observing professional colour during his time with the customised hair colour business, eSalon. He had seen how colourists always mix colour by hand, a process that is not only susceptible to improvisation but that almost automatically creates a surplus of unused formula. It tends to taketwo to three shades to mix a client’s colour but only about half or a quarter tube of each shade is used. If colour runs out mid-application, it’s normal to run back to the colour bar and mix the full amount again, in order to get the same consistency. Says Gimenez: “What’s left in the mixing bowl after colouring a client’s hair gets thrown out, as does unused product in the multiple bottles of colour opened to create that person’s shade, since opened bottles of colour have a short shelf life before the formula begins to oxidise. If what’s left over isn’t quickly used on another client, it simply gets thrown away.
“On top of that, salons typically purchase a professional colour brand’s full portfolio of 100+ shades, many of which are nearly identical with only very subtle pigment differences,” he continues. “Itopened my eyes to all the unnecessary spending and excess waste that’s occurring, and I thought, there has to be a better business model.”
Gimenez’s solution is the Yuv Lab (pronounced “you’ve”), a patent-pending refillable cartridge-based dispenser that’s light enough to carry under your arm (making it perfect for freelancers, too), and that can store and dispense millions of customised colour formulations. Instead of mixing colour by hand, Yuv does it all with the touch of a button. The machine’s sensors – Gimenez had a whole team of robotics and manufacturing experts working for him – measure and calibrate exactly how much of each colour is to be used on a client, then it stores that information online for future visits, eliminating the need for keeping clients’ formulas on hand-written notecards (which as we all know, can often be marked incorrectly or get lost altogether).
Yuv uses refillable aluminium cartridges, rather than single-use plastic bottles, ticking important sustainability boxes – every delivery includes prepaid return shipping labels to send empty cartridges back to the company. The colour itself (which Gimenez knew had to be world-class) was created by a speciality colour formulation lab in Switzerland. It provides up to 100 per cent grey coverage, using ME-PPD technology to dramatically reduce allergic reactions. The Lab is also equipped with all the developers needed, including a cream bleach, and offers the flexibility to substitute ingredients to create semi-permanent formulas.
But here’s the bit that’s truly revolutionary: you don’t purchase any colour inventory upfront. Yuv Lab runs on a ‘pay as you dispense’ model, meaning salons and freelancers will only be charged for what they use, eliminating paying for dead stock and cutting down on waste. The smart system tracks colour consumption over time and adjusts consignment deliveries to match what you use, streamlining inventory and saving precious shelf space.
“We bill for the grams of colour used, which is precisely tracked by the Yuv Lab machine and stored in your online account,” explains Gimenez. “The cost per full tube of colour is roughly the same as what the other major salon brands charge, but it’s pay-as-you-go colour, so you get better value because each tube lasts longer, and you never pay for unused formula.” He estimates that Yuv can reduce product waste and cut colour spend by as much as 35 per cent on both fronts.
It costs £49 a month to subscribe, which includes a Yuv Lab, an iPad to access its app, a thermal printer to label hair colour bowls, and access to its business solutions. “Even with our fee, you still save 25 to 35 per cent on overall colour costs because Yuv cuts out product waste and you’re not paying for inventory,” says Gimenez. “And renting the machine, rather than buying it upfront, removes all fear of expensive commitment.”
Gimenez has thought about potential barriers to Yuv Lab, too – for example, he knows that colourists get attached to their current colour brand and so do their clients, who’ve been depending on the existing hair colours. To get salons and hair colourists comfortable with switching, Yuv grasps what’s been effective for them to date to enable its machine to replicate that.
Explains Gimenez, “Instead of forcing people to learn a new system, Yuv allows each hairdresser working in the salon to customise their account. That means Yuv works bespoke to each colourist and their way of working, which means it’s not a problem if you have a new team hire and they’ve got their own unique approach to mixing and using colour.”
But most important of all to Gimenez was to reassure colourists they can still be creative with Yuv – in fact Yuv pledges to amplify creativity. The machine enables hair colourists to play with tones, ammonia levels, pH, opacity and more, and repeat the results of their playing consistently after they’ve pinned down their desired concoction. Gimenez envisions hair colourists developing tailored hair colour palettes akin to Spotify playlists of hair dye that they can leverage to boost their personal brands.
The Yuv HQ is in London because, “it’s a good benchmark market for a hair salon business in that you’re connected both to Western Europe and the US,” says Gimenez. Plus, he loves London. YuvLab has been put through its paces in a selection of London salons and now, with the feedback in place, the time has come to roll it out further. Grace Dalgleish and Samantha Cusick have beenappointed UK colour ambassadors (“Yuv will revolutionise our industry,” says Dalgleish. “I can’t wait to create my own bespoke palette for the brand”, while Cusick will collaborate with Yuv to develop new shades and formulations that meet the needs of modern salons and freelancers). And they have just been joined by Jack Mead and Lydia Wolfe from Jack & The Wolfe. Says Gimenez: “Their commitment to pushing creative boundaries and their influence in the industry make them an ideal fit for the brand”.
Gimenez is carefully building its salon and hair colourist network, one by one, knowing that as the word spreads, there’s a growing waitlist of salons that want Yuv Lab. Scaling up will come once every box is ticked. “I really want our first clients to be satisfied,” he says, “and then the volume will come. So, to me, the number one thing is the satisfaction of those first clients. The plans for growing will happen once everything is ready.”
Francisco, we’re ready!
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