find the best barber. for you.

How do you define a good haircut? A good barber?

A good haircut is a consequence of a good barber.

A barber’s ability and foresight to ask enough questions to know if you should have the haircut you are talking about. To ask why backwards until we can’t go back anymore.

I believe this is at the core of being a good barber. It starts with the questions. Us getting to know you. I think your haircut can be a reflection of what you want out of life.

Neat and tidy?

No nonsense.

Nothing but nonsense?

Do you take your time? Do you just need to get in, get out, get back to it?

Your barber has the hacks to get you there. Do they have the questions to know what hacks you need?

Sometimes I get a weird look when I ask what you do with your time outside of work . Do you like to read? Are you full tilt full time? How much time do you want to spend on your look? I’m not here to judge, I need to know what makes you tik if you want a good snip. A good snip for you that is. I can make you great in this chair no matter what. If it’s a look you can not recreate on your own then…. There was no fucking point to doing that was there!

That’s the homage paid to the minutiae of the craft. The rest is the same stuff that it takes to meet the standards I have set for myself to be a good human, when interacting with other humans. Which is all of the time. Really when are you ever performing an action, that doesn’t have a ripple to another human somewhere? When my upstairs neighbour doesn’t put his garbage tags on his garbage bags, that shit doesn't get picked up, then the bags sit outside of the door to my biz until I move them, they stink up the sidewalk, and I get caught up in being pissed off about that and am not present or kind to my first few clients, until I remember I could die 2 mins from now and I don’t want my last thoughts to be spent on the neighbours garbage. I digress.

My good barber/ human metrics are as follows.

Be present. Be kind. Listen to understand. Be silent unless you are enriching your environment. Meet people where they are. Support them where they are not.

Where are people when it comes to their looks? How we look is pretty wrapped up in our overall sense of self for most people, and we’re fucked up about it! It’s maybe not entirely our fault…

The beauty industry for years has been predicated on manipulating people through their insecurities.

This doesn’t mean the person cutting your hair is evil. Maybe it means they have bought into the same bull shit you did. About how we are supposed to look? I think this started happening across a lot of aspects of our lives in the 1930s when advertising became less about communicating the hard facts about products and more about communicating to the public how this product could fulfill their deepest desires and innermost needs , things like : love, safety , purpose.

Behind the chair, we have the privilege of hosting an intimate experience. People often open up to their barbers to tell them things they don’t feel comfortable talking to anyone else about. A fucking gold mine of data for a marketer. We are all selling something, when people open up to you what are you going to sell them?

We could use this trust to exploit people, and it does happen every day.

TBH I have said sh!t like this. I just try not to now:

“Oh you got dumped?! What an idiot! They’ll regret that when they see this hair! You better grab this shampoo too, you deserve it!” Wrong! That peep deserves some real talk. Some empathy. Maybe a story about how you got over a break up, the book you read, that thing your friend said to you that made all the difference. That YouTube vid that got ya through it.

Every person in the chair deserves the opportunity to grow. And with our privileged position as the one trusted to hold the sharp tools, we have the responsibility to provide a space where people feel comfortable enough to be challenged, feel anything they want to, and learn from it.

I’ll leave you with a question. Does this sound like your barber?