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Like many entrepreneurs, hair colorist Josh Wood has had to change how he does business in the midst of the pandemic.
“We have no salon operations at the moment, but boy oh boy, the DTC has gone crazy,” Wood said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast, regarding product sales.
Wood founded Josh Wood Colour a year and a half ago, after 30 years of working as a hair colorist and 20 as the owner of a salon in London.
The company has transitioned its hair stylists and colorists to instead head up video consultations and live chats, and it soon plans to publish tutorials on finding the right hair color product and how to apply it at home — which was always a big part of Josh Wood Colour’s business.
“It’s only through DTC that I can really have direct communication,” said Wood.
Overall, Wood said the pandemic is “really giving me and the team great creativity and great bandwidth to be able to really think how we can best support our person at home with every element of what they need.”
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Wood joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to talk about the market gap he saw before starting his own color line, the emotional value of keeping to a beauty regime even while in isolation and his huge respect for competitor Madison Reed.
Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.
The market gap
“We did a mountain of market research, and it was evident to us that people who were shopping at Boots or Duane Reade or CVS were really disappointed. They were disappointed with the experience, they were disappointed with the selection process, and they were really disappointed with the end result. But there wasn’t really anything else for them to do. If they were driven to coloring their hair at home because of time constraints or finance, they really felt they were stuck in a place they weren’t happy with; there was no alternative.”
What this unusual time can bring to the brand
“Looking forward, I’m getting a real understanding of what ‘at home’ really means for our community. We’re building out a world that will mean people have much more choice, really, when we reopen the doors, because they’ll have been in a digital-only world for such a period of time. It’s really giving me and the team great creativity and great bandwidth to be able to really think how we can best support our person at home with every element of what they need, or even what they’ve been used to in a salon.”
Keeping to habits can help
“On an emotional level, what we’re hearing is people saying, ‘Look, if I can just keep those really small things going — if I can keep my beauty regime of hair color intact — it really allows me to be able to deal with the bigger picture. I’m still working, now I’ve got the kids at home…’ For a lot of the people who are talking to us, their roles have grown by 50%. Just keeping the small things together, I think, provides the building blocks to keeping the bigger things together.”
