Today we’d like to introduce you to Stephen Richmond.
Hi Stephen, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was working at a salon in New York when the pandemic started and everything closed. I didn’t see my clients for the duration of the lockdown, but when things started to open up, I was being asked more and more often to go to the clients’ houses to do their hair there. From listening to my client’s stories, I found that they still didn’t feel entirely comfortable going back to crowded salons, and even as the world started to ease back to normal, I was surprised that my clients continued to invite me to their homes. It turned out, they preferred the ease of the house-call system because they didn’t have to brave the traffic, transit, and crowded salon experience. I wanted to bring this confidence to more people, so I created FUZZ, a modern, mobile hairstyling company.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
My brother and I started this from scratch and it has been a long road to get here. While both of us have skills that are necessary to this particular business, neither of us had a huge amount of actual business start-up experience, so the last year has been pretty un-smooth. After having the initial idea, we had to do a lot of market research and figure out how to make this happen. We taught ourselves many of the nuances of starting a business, and my brother, a UX and web designer, created the brand identity and built our website from the ground up. Starting a business is a difficult but achievable goal, and we were lucky to be able to utilize the knowledge of our business advisors at the Small Business Development Center to help us get off the ground. But the road is never very smooth, and it seems like something new pops up every week, whether it’s book-keeping, marketing, social media, etc., so we felt like we would jump a hurdle, then have to learn a whole new skill to get over the next one. Still, we are incredibly grateful for all of the advice we’ve had along the way and grateful to have been able to learn and have this experience in the first place.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
As a hairdresser, I specialize in blending barbering techniques with traditional salon scissors over comb styling to create a specialized cutting style. Having worked in both salons and barber settings, I set out to find the best way to cut and style hair for clients of any gender, bringing softer looks into the barbering space and more textured, sometimes shorter cuts into the salon space. I’ve been very fortunate to have spent the last ten years working in Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, New York, and London, learning from amazing stylists and pioneering my own unique style of hairdressing, with a focus on softer, organic, textured looks. When I set out to start FUZZ, I wanted to take the gender binary out of the hairdressing experience by utilizing this combined technique and pairing it with gender-neutral pricing that’s solely based on the length and complexity of the desired style.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
I moved a lot as a kid, having been born in London and moving to Georgia, USA, when I was four, then to Issaquah, Washington, when I was ten. Spending my teen years in a small mountain town, I gained an interest in nature and still take inspiration from that to this day. I was also known for being a pretty outgoing kid and I was always making a lot of jokes. Performing and comedy came very naturally to me, which actually got me into a little bit of trouble because I was the class clown who couldn’t sit still. Hairdressing came about because I decided to pursue a trade, and felt like the social aspect of hairdressing could fit really nicely with my love for conversation, cracking jokes, and generally enjoying the time I spend with people.
Pricing:
- Barbering with Styling, $115
- Blowout/Styling, $105
- Short Cut with Styling, 140$
- Long Cut with Blowout, $185
Contact Info:
- Website: www.fuzzmobilestylists.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/fuzz.hair
Image Credits
Katrina Jenkins
