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28
Jul 2024
As Ocean Hair marks 40 years, its owner would like to see the return of the perm
Not many hairdressers stay in the business for so long that their first customers end up bringing their grandchildren in for a haircut. But James Chalmers has now joined this elite club, and his business, Ocean Hair in Harrogate, marked its 40th anniversary this month.
If you’re not familiar with the name, that may be because Ocean Hair has spent the last four decades not on one of the town’s main thoroughfares, but tucked away behind the old Debenhams building, on Union Street.
James and his wife Heidi met when they were both working at Esquire, a large and very popular unisex salon at the bottom end of Station Parade. Esquire was one of the biggest names in hairdressing locally in the 1970s and ’80s, and they worked there happily for owner Mike Brough for 13 years before eventually branching out on their own.
James said:
I thought I was old at 27. I thought, ‘If you don't do it now, you never will’.
James and Heidi
They moved into premises that had been called Douglas Hair Design, and before that Elizabeth Haute Coiffure, and renamed the salon Ocean Hair Design. The name was chosen to evoke the Art Deco ocean liners of the 1930s, although the ‘Design’ part of the name was later dropped because James thought it sounded pretentious. The new salon opened on Friday 13 in July 1984.
The 1980s were a lively decade, and James remembers those days with a lot of affection.
He said:
It was interesting times in the fashion world and music, and there were all sorts of things going on politically as well in the background – Greenham Common and all that sort of stuff.
The ’80s were all about the New Romantics and big hair, and ladies had shoulder pads on shoulder pads, like American football players. Some of that may come back. After all, fashion is cyclical – things come around again.
One thing he hopes will make a reappearance is the perm, short for permanent wave, which enjoyed an intense surge of popularity in the mid to late ’80s. That fashion translated into some handsome paydays for hairdressers.
James said:
Perms were massive – even people who had curly hair had it permed. At Christmas, the orders for perms would be stacked up.
But when perming went out of fashion, we’d get panicky that Christmas wasn’t going to happen. It was a worrying time.
Wella [the haircare product company] was constantly trying to think of new ways to reintroduce the soft perm to get the market back, but it just didn’t happen. In fact, they don’t even teach perming at college anymore, and that’s purely because they can’t get the models. Nobody wants a perm now.
One of the things that has improved, he says, is the range of equipment and products now available. The ’80s and ’90s saw a boom in haircare innovation, with mousse, gel, wax, clay, mud and all manner of other products to mould and sculpt hair into increasingly adventurous shapes.
James said:
People used all sorts of things to spike hair up – gelatine, sugar-water, egg-white and even shellac. To get that spiky, avant-garde look, we used to send the juniors out to get KY Jelly, because it was water-soluble, unlike Brylcreem. Now, of course, you can get products that do the same job, although you probably wouldn’t use them as a sexual lubricant...
After doing well out of the perm trend, James and Heidi seized the opportunity to buy their premises in the early 1990s. This was the time of the recession, and in Harrogate, major employers such as the Ministry of Defence and chemicals giant ICI were closing down and moving out.
James said:
Most of the block was occupied by [electrical goods chainstore] Tandy. It was all owned by a Kuwaiti property company, and after the Gulf War they liquidated a lot of their assets and sold it.
A small property company from London bought it, with us as a sitting tenant, and then we bought it from them. It was the time of the property crash, so nobody wanted it and we got it at a good price.
Ocean Hair on Union Street in Harrogate
And there they have stayed, off the beaten track but thriving nonetheless due largely to word-of-mouth.
The knack to being a successful hairdresser, says James, is “a mix of things”:
You need enthusiasm and an interest in fashion and design, as well as a love of people.
I’ve known some really talented hairdressers – creative but silent – and they do a brilliant job but just don’t get the customers.
On the other hand, I knew one hairdresser who really wasn’t that good, but she had such a personality that people kept on coming back. So it’s a balance of personality and creativity.
Keeping fresh is also essential in an industry where the whims of fashion can make a mockery of customer loyalty. He said:
You yourself can come in and out of fashion. You can be the enfant terrible when you start out, but then other salons open, and people move on.
Sometimes you’ll do something really good for a client and they’ll come back and ask you to do it again – and you can do it just the same, but it won’t have that same impact on them, so they’ll go off looking for something new. You’ve constantly got to be renewing.
James and Heidi with long-serving employees Kim and Sarah
Ocean Hair now employs four people, including James and Heidi, who both work three days a week. Colleagues Sarah, who has been with the firm for 37 years, and Kim (nearly 20 years) work four days a week. The couple may have slowed the pace, but James has no plans to stop just yet.
He said:
We’ve just got to the stage where we’re happy with what we’re doing. I’m not looking to advertise Ocean – I just want to say thank you to all the people who have supported us over the years.
People might think we’re lucky, but as they say, the harder you work, the luckier you become – and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve worked hard, constantly, so the gods have been with us.
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