Shag Hair
Shag.ed Online
THE CHALLENGE
When a small business has big plans, we make it our business to turn dreams into reality. Shag Hair have built a name for themselves locally as the go-to salon when only the best colourist will do. In addition to servicing Newcastle’s most discerning beauties, they’re also building a strong following in the professional training circuit as stylists line up to learn their coveted techniques.
What started out as two best friends and a love of all things hair has grown into a thriving business. However these women didn’t just want to style hair, they wanted to define what style was (#bangingbalayage #fangirlfoils 😜✌🏼). With their cheeky brand and solid reputation to boot, they started by hosting training sessions for other stylists at their purpose-built salon space. Like so many of us, when the pandemic hit they had to pivot online, but they saw this as an opportunity and decided to dream even bigger.
Enter Shag.ed…
They had some clear ideas about their vision for Shag.ed including:
Going online meant they could take their training to the world – but they needed help… so we got to work.
We needed to leverage the existing platform whilst executing their vision to a global industry standard. We started as we do with all web projects, by mapping the user journey. As you may imagine, theirs originates from social media in a big way so that was an important context to consider.
From there, we looked at the various types of training options they wanted to offer such as 1-on-1 sessions, group training and online tutorials and built out an online portal which would allow them to grow and expand over the next couple of years as their vision continued to evolve.
These girls are fierce but so is the competition, so we knew this had to feel as sexy as the clients walking out of their salon. The brand experience needed to be seamless and all within a limited budget. So we did our research and leveraged the best existing tools, purpose built to deliver exactly what they were after. No re-inventing the wheel here, it was all about finding the best tool for the job and bringing those together to create a beautiful, seamless experience.
We used WooCommerce with their existing theme to handle the eCommerce and “product listing” side of things, while an online tutorial software solution was used to house and manage the tutorial videos.