Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Good morning, welcome to Jazz Shapers. It’s where the Shapers of Business join the Shapers of Jazz, Soul and Blues. My guest today, I’m really pleased to say, is Josh Wood, Founder of Josh Wood Colour, the expert-led, home hair colour system. Growing up in Barnsley during the miners’ strike and high unemployment, Josh’s upbringing influenced his work ethic. As he says, “I think a working class mentality was drilled into me there.” Searching for something creative, Josh went to Art College but it was at his Saturday job, sweeping floors at his local hair salon that he realised hairdressing might be the answer. Despite being told on a Youth Training Scheme that a career in this field wasn’t for him, Josh trained at the Vidal Sassoon salons in Leeds and London before working alongside Vidal himself in New York. After Co-founding a salon in 1999 and twenty years as a celebrity colourist, including dying David Bowie’s hair red for his Earthling album cover, Josh decided to open his own space with his partner, Jonathan Davies, before launching his disruptor brand, the Josh Wood Colour System, in 2018 to bridge the gap between home treatment and the salon experience. Hello. How are you?
Josh Wood
I’m very good and how are you?
Elliot Moss
I’m alright, thank you. I mentioned Barnsley because a while ago I interviewed Marcus Wareing actually, and Marcus and I were talking about the north of England, another fine export from the north. I mentioned it in the beginning, your working class, and you talked about it, your working class work ethic. Did you have to leave Barnsley? Was that always in your mind even as a young kid, in terms of sort of seeking fame and fortune?
Josh Wood
Definitely wasn’t seeking fame and fortune, I think there was a need probably to be able to be me, to be better accepted, you know, being gay, it wasn’t the easiest in the early 80s coming out of, you know leaving school, so on and so forth, and I always felt that I wanted to somehow try to express myself through my work and there just wasn’t the platform in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, in let’s say 1986 to be able to be maybe as avant-garde or as daring or to transform myself into who I wanted to become.
Elliot Moss
And that sense of wanting to become who you were, did you feel that from a very young age, in terms of expressing yourself? I don’t mean your sexuality, I mean in terms of you being you and wanting to be creative. Was there a sense of “I want to invent stuff?”
Josh Wood
No, not at all. It was a very, fairly mundane primary school, state secondary school, Barnsley, you know, it was a bit rough round the edges in those days. I guess there was two things; I wanted to feel opportunity and I didn’t feel opportunity was at my fingertips in Barnsley and I think the early 80s, mid 80s, when I was, you know, leaving school, there was a real moment, you know, Sheffield had become such a muso city, you know with The Leadmill and there were new bands and The Human League and I guess I fell into understanding that being me, being creative, visual, I needed to align more with those things than maybe more, you know, more traditional ways of education or starting work.
Elliot Moss
And so those first few hours or days in a hairdresser’s salon, was it like a, hold on a minute, this might just be home one day? Or again, was it not like that?
Josh Wood
Well I was, you know, sweeping up hair, I mean there was no great creating…
Elliot Moss
I know, it’s not, yes. No but you were around, you were closer to something which you would have considered creative.
Josh Wood
Yes. I mean I was at art college which wasn’t creative at all to be fair, it was anything but, but I think it wasn’t the first few hours, it took a while, I’d been there about a month, five, six weeks and I just thought, “I’m really comfortable here.” It was much more the culture of salon probably at that stage even than I hadn’t considered being a hairdresser, let alone a colourist, I didn’t even know colourists existed so, yeah, for me it felt much more about a personal fit than it did a creative fit, at the beginning.
Elliot Moss
I’m just going to jump to the end. We’re in 2021 now and here you are, a well-known person, doing well, creating colours, you love red – anyone that knows Josh will know that red is his thing and you are a bit of the master of that – did you even think this was possible, as you first entered into the profession?
Josh Wood
No, I mean, there was such naivety about working with clients to start with when I came from Barnsley to London and I was working in Sloane Street and, you know, the first few days, somebody said ‘Mrs so and so’s hair’s finished, can you get her driver’. I was like ‘screwdriver’? I mean, I’d never heard of a driver and that naivety served me well and I’m still very inquisitive, I think that keeps the creative mind really on point and it’s interesting because I pick apart everything that I do creatively to try to understand that process and improve the process. Somebody said to me recently, and it’s a fairly hackneyed saying but I haven’t come this far to only come this far, you know I’ve very clearly got my eyes set on helping to redefine how people access hair colour. I know very well what it means to people, how it feeds into one’s wellbeing but, yeah, the horizon for me feels very bright and I’m excited that I can apply the creativity to really re-engineering something that feels quite old and dusty.
Elliot Moss
Creativity in general for you, Josh and you articulated it really well immediately. It sounds like you could have gone off in a number of different directions, actually with that attitude because it strikes me you are a very creative person. What is it about colour that appeals all these years later?
Josh Wood
I mean, the appeal, you know sat here today is in some ways the actually, the starting point of why I chose to be a colourist in the first place, I mean I wasn’t good at styling, I was really rubbish so that would have been an uphill, creative process for anybody but there weren’t many men colouring hair, there weren’t many colourists as a whole so I understood that, you know, it was niche at that particular point. Jump forward nearly thirty years, you know, there’s really, really good up and coming and young colourists but this idea that it gave me the ability to slightly have a bigger voice and a bigger platform, was appealing very early on and it’s today training younger people, I can see that hairdressing as a whole because in some ways it was always the career that one did if you didn’t take further education. It can really appeal to people that want to learn in a very different way and I think I was one of those people.
Elliot Moss
And learning in a different way is one thing but it also makes me think about an artist who’s kind of got a style in a way but then will go to the studio and new things would emerge, they’ll experiment and they’ll go ‘oh hold on a minute, if that red there was mixed with that pallet there, I wonder’. You are essentially creating but obviously there are these people there called clients so how do you manage the balance between what’s in Josh Wood’s head and what you think is right for the person sitting there in front of you?
Josh Wood
I learned very early on, sometimes what’s inside Josh Wood’s head, is not deserving of being on somebody else’s head. Yeah, it’s interesting. Colour is my medium, you know that’s you know hair is the fabric or the canvas, colour is the medium that I choose to work with but it’s much more about how one views a career. You know, when I’m in the salon, I guess I’m filtering out the work that I’ve done on the catwalks or in photoshoots or on, you know, well-known people. The salon work for me is much more about being in touch with a community of people that are colouring their hair very regularly and learning what makes it easier, what they want, where I can influence that but there’s another part of my career, you know working in the film industry or fashion, that’s total fantasy, I mean we’re often talking about a human being man or woman that doesn’t exist, we’re creating a character and you know that is incredibly gratifying if you are creative because it gives you the… you’re creating on somebody that is never going to give you any feedback so it’s a way really of real self-expression.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for Josh Wood, he’ll be back in a couple of minutes and if you hadn’t thought about the world of colour and the world of fantasy on the one side and reality on the other, well now you may be excited, nay titillated, by the idea of actually becoming a colourist, and not that I want them to Josh, obviously, we want you to remain at the top of your game, just in case anyone who is listening, don’t get any funny ideas. Stay with me for much more from Josh but right now we are going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all of the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Suzi Sendama and Emily Dorotheou talk about how fashion brands can be more sustainable while maintaining profitability and what consumers should be doing to support sustainable fashion.
You can enjoy all our former Jazz Shapers and hear this very programme again with Josh on the Jazz Shapers podcast or if you have a smart speaker, you can ask it to play Jazz Shapers, you know the drill, and there you will find many of our recent shows going all the way back, if you want to, I believe, to around 2012, so the less recent ones but they are all good too. But back to today and Josh Wood, he’s the Founder of Josh Wood Colour, the expert-led, home hair colour system. You touched on the world of fantasy and you touched on the world of creation and being less constrained in a way by reality and a person saying, “No Josh, I just really need a little bit of a lift here and there’s a little bit of grey on the scalp”, you know not that that’s not important because it is and we’ll come on to wellbeing as well. I mentioned David Bowie and there’s a lot of other famous people. You said already, it wasn’t about you seeking fame and fortune, I’ve read about you saying “I’m not, you know, fame doesn’t impress me, it’s just I get on with my job” but what was it like working with someone who was possibly one of the best musicians ever? What was he like as a human being?
Josh Wood
I mean, my, I have to say I’ve got to hold my hands up, my knowledge of music history is pretty poor. As I say, the work ethic didn’t give me a lot of time to be getting involved in anything other than learning how to be a good colourist. I didn’t really know David’s music very well. Of course I knew, you know, the big hits. I didn’t really understand how influential he was. My birth into the music world in a way being in Barnsley in the 80s, I slightly missed it somehow, I mean I know that’s sacrilege to some people. You know, I met him via other people that I was working with. I worked with him for a long period of time, he became a very good friend. People often talk about this period. For me, it really felt like collaboration, he asked questions and he was genuinely interested in my opinion and answers and that was, in a way, how we could move on his personal image to match either the art that he was creating at the time, he was you know a prolific painter, and certainly some of the, two or three of the albums that I worked on with him but it was really Earthlings where he was living back in London, that was very important for him, he’d met designers like Alexander McQueen that were helping him with his stage costumes and it was at that moment where he wanted to be a lot more self-expressive really with his hair colour and that’s in a way why we ended up with that kind of very, very bold hyper red that had a nod to Ziggy but it felt much more 90s I guess because it was much brighter and much more vivid than a colour one would have been able to create in the late 60s/70s.
Elliot Moss
That point you made about he asked questions and he wanted your opinion, is that one of your mantras as well, if you are going to talk to people and you are going to ask them questions, do you surround yourself with people whose answers you value?
Josh Wood
Well, in business, I mean you’ve got to remember, you know, I left school with about one and three-quarter GCSEs or whatever they were, there was no great learning experience for me in formal education and I’ve learned, you know, yeah, it’s a really, really good point, actually, it makes me think and in the organisation today, where I am really not skilled or able to add value, I hire people that can so, I guess in a way, that is listening. My job, on a day-to-day basis, is a listening job and I’m filtering what people are telling me about how they want to look and how they want to be perceived by the outside world and that can be just, you know, it can be somebody that I’ve worked with over a long period of time or it can be creating a character for an album cover or a magazine shoot so, the really key to success for me in the creative world and probably I take that over into my business world, is this true need to co-create and that takes listening skills and responsive skills.
Elliot Moss
And, ten years ago when you set up your own salon, is that exactly what was going on? Is that what you managed to pull off, at that time?
Josh Wood
I find opening salons really easy, you know, I think I’m quite connected culturally into large cities, new restaurants, new music venues, theatre, dance, so actually I always find opening a hairdressing salon an extension of what people are experiencing in wider culture. Finding great talent to work with, people that have got a similar vision that maybe want to do it differently, take a bit of a risk, that’s more difficult but yeah, I mean I don’t view opening a salon anywhere near as challenging as I do running a brand or a business that’s making a physical product.
Elliot Moss
You talked about the physical, a salon, easy, tick, physical brand, not so easy, you launched yours in 2018, one of the few people to know that eighteen months later the number of people needing to dye their own hair at home would go up by 3000%, well done on that, probably the only person on the planet who knew that that was going to happen. Why was it harder, Josh? A person like you connected to the zeitgeist, a person like you understands what people need. What is a physical product, 33 variants of colour and so on, why is that more tricky?
Josh Wood
Business in that sphere and world, it needs exactly the same application that it does whether you are making automobiles or packing carrots, you know, it’s operations, it’s the model, it’s the structure of the business, it’s the culture of the business. I’m really, really dyslexic with numbers. Maths is not my strong point so I’ve always, always, you know, in the early days I hired the best bookkeeper that I could get or, you know the best head of finance that I could get, the best accountants that I could afford and in the business today, it’s challenging on so many levels, as I’m sure a lot of listeners know, trying to you know manage and motivate and move a business and a team forward. I’m learning to find that equally as creative but it doesn’t… that’s not the kind of creativity that comes naturally to me, it take me quite a long time to absorb, I’ve got to really take in the information and process it well but I love growth, I love innovation, I love inspiration, I like people, I like making people feel good and those are the principles today that are at the centre of our business which is we only make products that our clients or customers tell us they want and make a difference to them. We started in 2018, you know, I launched the D2C model and with a high street partner, Boots, but it was the D2C offer that was exciting for me and I didn’t know we were going to be in a world where you couldn’t access basic things that you felt like were being taken away from you, like hair colour.
Elliot Moss
Yeah. It feels like there’s a tension, for me, just looking at you and obviously we don’t know each other, I’ve just met you. Between the incredibly instinctive, creative, spontaneous Josh, who you give him a challenge or you give him a room to breathe and he creates a fantasy, a world that doesn’t exist, you give him a client who is difficult, he’ll manage them, that spontaneity there with the desire and almost the desire for the security of the substance of something, it looks like you are a proper student, that you really want to know something and you are very humble because you are at the top of your game and, you know, I was reading about you and you are included in the Evening Standard’s Progress 1000 you know in terms of being most influential and you’ve got all these awards that you’ve won and yet, here you are saying well, you know, I’m not great with numbers and I really want to get under the skin of it, that sense of substance and importance of substance to you, where is that from?
Josh Wood
I think it’s coming from a very, very humble background, you know, a Council flat in Barnsley, Yorkshire wasn’t the greatest start in life and believe you me, I’m not going back there, I mean not back to Barnsley, I love going back to Barnsley but I’m not going back to the feeling that there was fewer choices and not the ability to, you know, grow and add value. There is a tension and I think what I’ve learned is really great businesses that do things differently, there has to be a tension because we’ve got a product that people really want, that’s expertly formulated, that I’ve worked really hard with the technicians and the chemists, to make that product. What I’ve got to do now is understand how to tell people about that and how to market that product and where to put it and how to put and getting from A to B. Those operational challenges, they are something that I’ve got an amazing team around me that help me deliver all of those propositions but I guess I want to democratise my expertise and what I’ve learned, I really believe that anybody, anywhere, should be able to access really good quality advice about what’s the best thing for their hair and their hair colour and I’m able to do that through our digital platform.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with my very honest Business Shaper today, it’s Josh Wood. We’ve also got our daily dose of jazz-funk/R&B fusion from The Blackbyrds, that’s all coming up so don’t go anywhere.
Josh Wood is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. You touched on something about, or maybe I’ve read it, you want people to feel good and actually it may sound superficial but a person’s hair and the way it looks and the style of it and the colour of it, and we all experience this, we’re all on the spectrum of it matters, it doesn’t matter, there’s, you know, I care, my wife cares a lot more. That sense of wellbeing, it feels like that’s a very big place to be and obviously through this lockdown, it’s been a critical part of literally people’s sanity. Has the game changed? Have the stakes got higher? Or are you just carrying on doing what you were doing before this lockdown happened?
Josh Wood
The stakes have always been the same, people’s hair colour – I’m a colourist so I feel qualified to talk about, you know, the emotional relationship one has with one’s hair colour – is vital to people’s wellbeing and how they feel about themselves. I mean, you get a bad hairstyle or a bad haircut, you wash it, it’s you know, yeah, I mean you may be unhappy with it but, you know, generally most people have a hair colour disaster story and it’s something that they feel quite often scarred by and again, you know, people really identify themselves by their hair colour, you know, somebody that’s a bright blonde, if she walked into a room, or he walked into a room, as sort of that person with, you know, mousy blonde hair, that would be, that’s disaster for somebody’s self-esteem. So, I’ve always known that the stakes are very high where hair colour is concerned. It really can help somebody to unlock the best version of themselves and that’s why in a way, the business that we are in is high risk because, you know, you’ve got to get it right. When we don’t get it right, it matters personally to me that we haven’t got it right. The great thing I learned about hair colour, very early on, you can fix virtually anything. You know, if you cut somebody’s hair two inches too short, short of putting hair extensions in and making it longer, you can’t add hair on but, you know, you make somebody too dark or too light or too green or too red or, there’s a way to fix it, there’s a way to soften it. So it’s high stakes, it’s vital to the way people feel about themselves but there’s also a way that you can – with expert knowledge – really make somebody feel the best version of themselves and I have to say, when you have that ‘ah ha’ moment, that reveal moment when you’ve coloured somebody’s hair and it’s like, it’s wow. That feeling is infectious.
Elliot Moss
Is that the best feeling for you because is that the moment you are at your happiest versus when you’ve cracked another colour for the products or when you are on a set, whether it’s a fashion show or something, is it for you personally Josh, is it when you see the smile on the client’s face, still, after all these years?
Josh Wood
It’s all one and the same actually. You know, whether you are on a photo shoot and you think ‘wow, I’ve created that’ or it’s a film set or it’s a Trust Pilot review from somebody that’s, you know, been colouring their hair out of salon or somebody that I’ve tendered myself. When somebody feels good about themselves, you feel it, it’s infectious, it’s life-enhancing for the person that’s received that treatment and the person that’s been able to deliver that, whether that is a product that you’ve bought from our D2C, whether it’s a model on a shoot, an actress on a red carpet, or somebody sat in my chair.
Elliot Moss
It’s been really nice talking to you. Thank you for your time, thank you for schooling me in where colour sits in the great thing that we call culture. It’s been brilliant. Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Josh Wood
Ann Peebles. She absolutely embodies for me, a time where it must have been incredibly difficult for women in the music industry, and her career spans such a long period of time and it’s creative and diverse. She was only invited into the Memphis music hall of fame in 2012. She’s been sampled by Missy Elliott and Wu-Tang Clan. What’s better than that? I Can’t Stand the Rain.
Elliot Moss
Ann Peebles there with I Can’t Stand the Rain, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Josh Wood. He talked about leaving Barnsley because he wanted to feel the opportunity and he wasn’t feeling it then back in the 80s for him. He talked about the words of advice that he received early on, I haven’t come this far just to come this far, and really nicely, he talked about wanting to democratise his expertise and literally put it in a bottle and on a video consultation. What could be better than that? That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You will find hundreds of more guests available to listen to in our archive, just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.