“As a company, we’ve always been inclusive when it comes to cutting and colouring hair. But in terms of textured hair – the styling, and the understanding of it, in terms of the approach, how different it can be – that’s something we’ve been leaning into more over the last few years. This project is almost the catalyst for us; it needs development and we need to outsource this to specialists, to help us really hone in on those skills.
In the first workshop, we chatted about what it’s like to grow up having Black hair, the psychological aspects of it, how it can become part of your identity. I really want us to do the work, to understand that because there’s a big movement in the community to lean into natural hair and to embrace it. Everyone brought a model, and it was about playing with hair, looking at how we would approach our models.
We’re doing more workshops to further our skills and we’re going to continue to do that across the board. We haven’t necessarily sought outside influences in the past, but it’s something that we’re going to be doing – with textured hair, with different tools, different philosophies, different approaches to hair. We’re really opening ourselves up – we’ve got our foundation, we know who we are… let’s see what else we can bring in for the team to inspire them to continue their journey.
The team are loving it, learning lots of new things around setting, braiding and twisting. It was great to talk about the simple things, like how to comb textured hair. Our normal approach would just be to brush it out and cut it. But Deborah was like, “no, you need to add moisture, add water, brush it out. And then the hair is ready to be cut and prepped”. The way that you put your brush in, the way that you prep the hair to be dried, or to be braided, or to be set. Unless you’re shown, there is a missing part of our education. This is about giving the team the confidence to be able to approach any hair type. They were buzzing afterwards.”
