How we went International

Featured: When a Backstreet Nuneaton Salon Went Global

Daisy's Hair Shop was a small salon on a backstreet in the market town of Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Over the course of a few years, our work was featured in national and international hairdressing magazines — sitting alongside stylists from the UK, the USA, Australia, Switzerland, Spain and Germany.

This isn't a story about one person. It never was. It's a story about a team — stylists, apprentices, the photographer, the models who gave up their time and let us loose on their hair, the salon owners who backed it, and everyone who did anything at all to get us shoot-ready, from colour application to sweeping up to holding the fort on the day. None of it happens without every one of those people.

A gradual build, an inconceivable idea

The team at Daisy's didn't arrive all at once — people joined gradually over the years, skills developed, and somewhere along the way the ambition to be seen in the trade press took hold. Where exactly that ambition started is hard to pin down. What's certain is that nobody expected it to actually happen.

The first coverage landed in 1999, with red hair work from two of the team's stylists. Then it kept happening, through the early 2000s. For a small salon on a Warwickshire backstreet, being published at all felt inconceivable. Being published alongside the international hairdressing world felt like something else entirely.

Who we were featured alongside

This is the detail that matters most, because it establishes just how big a deal this genuinely was. Across these features, Daisy's Hair Shop sat page-by-page with:

Internationally: Hair Machine (Adelaide, Australia), Brig Van Oste of Orbit (USA), Gabe Aguir and Frank Tripodi at Phases Hairdressing (USA), David Hooper at Masterclass, Milton Salon (USA), Gina Khan at Yosh for Hair (USA), Moving Hair (Switzerland, for Goldwell), Maria Yus (Zaragoza, Spain), New Carité (Valencia, Spain), Rene Asch (Stuttgart, Germany), and Biba (Australia).

Nationally: Trevor Sorbie, London. Dorothy at Hair by Hammonds, Sheffield, for Goldwell. Sacha Mascolo and the Essensuals Art Team. Cutting Room Artistic Team, Leeds. Anna Sjoberg at Headmasters, for L'Oréal. Razors Edge Artistic Team, Manchester. Carmen Little for Alan Edwards, Glasgow. Terence Renati for Messy Me. Ian Davies at Ocean, Cardiff. McMillan Hair, Bothwell, Lanarkshire. Kristian Francis and David Williams at Zappas, Wokingham, using Tigi. Xposure Hair Design, Penkridge. Monroe Hairdressing, Leatherhead.

A small aside: at Salon International in London, we met Dorothy Hammonds— up north, at Hair by Hammonds — and sat with her over coffee. Her work was as good in person as it looked on the page and if i’m not mistaken her own work featured in Vogue.

Salon International, and a stage none of us expected to be on

Before the team eventually went their separate ways, Daisy's was invited as VIP guests to Salon International in London, to showcase our work on stage. We went as a full team — stylists, models and all — and the honest truth is we were excited and terrified in equal measure. None of us had done anything like it before. It was there that we met Errol Douglas, with photos taken together, and where journalists, including French journalists, interviewed and photographed the stylists and the models on the day. We were told the work would feature in a French hair couture magazine in Paris. We never actually saw a copy of it ourselves. Years later, my model and friend from that day, Gina, who'd moved to Wales for a time, told me that a friend of hers apparently has a copy of it tucked away in her attic. Whether it's ever been dug out, I couldn't say — but it's a nice thought that a copy might still exist somewhere.

That same year, 2004, the dynamics in the salon shifted, and senior team members left to set up their own salon. I carried on afterwards, returning to Salon International the following year with my own models.

Four stars, and the people at the front desk

The same magazines carried the Good Salon Guide index at the back — an independent scheme, running since 1993, that inspects salons against strict criteria around training, qualifications and standards, rating them Registered, 3, 4 or 5 Star. Daisy's held 4 stars consistently. Five stars required a dedicated front-of-house presence, which is where Kelly and Jackie came in — the secretaries who ran the front desk, greeted clients and kept the appointments in order. They were brilliant at it.

How it felt

Honestly? We loved it. We came from a backstreet salon that had never conceived of anything like this, and suddenly we were being featured next to stylists from three continents. There was a bit of big-headedness along the way — red hair in town, feeling like we'd arrived, celebrating harder than we probably should have. Looking back now, older and more grounded, it's easy to laugh about it. But of course we felt on top of the world. Who wouldn't?

Daisy's Hair Shop closed for good in 2007. Everyone who'd been part of it moved on to their own paths, some opening their own salons, some going on to genuinely remarkable careers internationally. That's something to be proud of, not with any hubris, just with real gratitude that it happened at all — and that it happened as a team.

I haven't named specific people because that could mean leaving someone out when everyone mattered in achieving this goal.

The images below are photos of the magazines so the quality isn’t the best.

Thankyou again to everyone that made the dream happen when it did.