Hair stylists come and go

Unfortunately hair stylists have their very own fate. They tend to dissapear. Once you think you have found someone, you hear that she quit her job and moved on. All the knowledge that this person had accumulated about your head she took with her. You are left to bet your head on the hands of whoever else is wearing a belt loaded with scissors. Hair stylists move on.

Progression to the level of dedicated hair styling is cut short. It´s a universal dilemma. She´s gone you realize, abandoned you and your good faith in building a hair cutting relationship. After spending an awful moment standing around in the hair dressing salon, you pass out. You reset your life. The next moment you are briefing the new hair stylist about the peculiarities of your hair. She will not understand you. She will do what she thinks is right. Only 1 in 5 hair stylists get the job done right.

5 in 5 hair stylists actually lack attitude. All of them.

A dedicated hair stylist is a scientist; passionate not about hair, but about people and their heads, about accentuating personalities hands-on. Precision hair cutting is just one tiny part of being a great hair stylist. I never met a dedicated hair stylist, therefore. All the time i do meet mediocre soon to be gone quick-fix fuck-ups.

Finding and keeping a hair stylist is impossible, given you are not among your nation´s richest 10%. You can´t own a hair dresser. Current business models do not account for the find & keep oriented people like me. It could be so easy. Here is how: Instead of running a salon and hire hair dressers (who won´t stay for long), you focus on running networks. You let any hair dresser work in your salon on her own account - anybody who walks in with a customer in need of a hair cut. Hair dressers operate as independent professionals and salons merely serve as a meeting place, maintaining no staff of hair dressers at all.

The deals are made between customer and hair dresser on their own terms. The customer relationship is no longer bound to a particular hair salon or hair salon chain. I could meet up with my hair dresser in any salon in any city. My hairdresser stays connected to me for a lifetime if i wanted this. She could maintain a one-to-one relationship with me. Salons on the network would focus on being good hosts and maintaining the network. This requires different skills than that of being a former black-belt hair cutter yourself.

This business model is a slap in the face, because it cuts out the salon owner as middleman. He can no longer mess up my relationship with the good hair stylist i was lucky to find. This business model however is a natural thing to try — in the pursuit of customization, democratization, networked comunication, and diminishing obstacles to mobility. If the hair salon would be invented today, why should the owner want to hire hair dressers? If you are about to be a hair dresser, why would you not want to work on your own account, if a network existed?

This mode of business would allow me to subscribe to the services of one or more hair stylists for as long as higher forces permit. No more fuss, no more dissapointed expectations, no more relationship building from scratch, no more sad stories of people who lost their favorite hair dresser.

When the mistress of hair goes, i am sad. I want her to be around when i need her. I want someone who is genuinely interested in the roots of hair and the origin of favored hairstyles in the struggle of life. Is that too much to ask?

Recipe to less sadness and more endurance in hair cutting relationships: Raise a salon in every city in the world. License the salons to entrepreneurs who operate under their own brand and join the network. Lure away all the hair dressers presently working as employees and let them join the network of independent, mobile, hairstyling obsessed professionals.

Involuntary loss of hair dressing prowess at your disposal is a drag on the economy. It costs us an estimated diluted yearly 37.5 Million EUR of investment money put into hair cutting sessions that end up with one side being sad; not to mention the cognitive strain that diverts your attention away from matters more urgent to survival.

Hair stylists come and go. That has to stop.

Image source: that's me fed up with sloppy hair stylists.