Step Outside Your Industry by Jordanna Cobella
I am a true believer in finding inspiration from outside your industry. I find it keeps your work unique and current and creates really powerful stories. Whether you are a business owner looking for ideas to enhance the value of your products or services, explore unmet customer needs or a session stylist creating a look for a fashion campaign, taking inspiration from other sectors is a huge opportunity not to be missed. Resist the urge to do what you’ve always done when looking for inspiration, you’ll be surprised how refreshing it is. This is a powerful tool particularly when you come head to head with a writers block/creative block. Many of the worlds best inventions, businesses and products were born out of an accidental trial and error of something new or out of a failure of something that required adaptation.
Similarly, collaboration and the coming together of 2 minds can also yield very powerful and often surprising ideas for innovation. There are some great examples in industry of creative solution that arose out of analogous fields. Agility should be at the heart of everything we do – both business wise and creatively.
So how do we apply this to our businesses/every day hair work?
The most beneficial way to demonstrate this is by giving examples.
E.g. 1) Each year, I create a new colour menu for our salon, essentially naming and branding new services based on trends – an idea I took from the makeup industry. To bring these new colour services to life, I create mood-boards to demonstrate the palette/the finish/the placement of the service. Rather than using pictures of hair, these boards are made up of a montage of images of food, interior design, lifestyle images and fashion. This is an inviting way for the client and the hairdresser to talk about and visualise colour from a different perspective in hope to inspire a new colour for the client. It also helps the client identify with the colour menu as they may relate to the lifestyle images or fashion pictures on the mood-board. I have found my colour services increase as well as colour creativity in the salon and finally found a way to encourage clients to explore a new colour service.
E.g.2) Creating a photographic collection each year is a commitment I spend a lot of time and money on. It gives myself and my team the opportunity to create new looks and imagery for the brand as well as content for PR, press or any industry competitions. When brainstorming for the shoot, I often look at graphics artists and street artists, such as Banksy, who tell a story, evoke emotion and often have a hidden underlying message in their artwork. He is motivated by movements; political or social and one can spend hours decoding or uncovering the message hidden within. My point here is not to create hair looks that encompass your political view, but to merely be influenced by something from outside your industry that strikes emotion will make your work unique. My 2 latest collections from the last 2 years have been my most successful in terms of uniqueness and attracted the most amount of PR and competition awards. One entitled ‘The Changing Face of Britain’ inspired by the implication of Brexit on the arts and one entitled ‘An ode to Alexander McQueen’ influenced by his quest to find beauty in the strangest of places.
In this current world of uncertainty, I would encourage anyone reading this to explore the ideas you haven’t given the time it deserves and start brainstorming new ways of doing things by taking influence from outside our industry. It plays a pivotal role in keeping your work, our industry, the service to clients and the business structures in the hair world very fresh, up to date and essentially consistently evolving.
