Sustainable Salons is stepping into the future

You may have noticed a few changes around here. Whether you’re a longtime supporter or stopping by for the first time, welcome to our re-vamped brand. We’re still the Sustainable Salons you know and love, but we’ve spent the past year working behind the scenes to bring you a better brand than ever before. 

Why? 

Well, we’ve been around the sun a few times now (eight years to be exact), and a refresh was sorely needed. While we started as a humble salon resource recovery program, we’ve blossomed into a for-purpose organisation that services more than just the hair industry. 

We now collect resources to divert from landfill from barbers, beauty and dermal clinics, hair salons and pet groomers. Thanks to the generous actions of everyday supporters like you, we’re also the number one collector of ponytails for charitable wigs, giving confidence back to those with medically-induced hair loss. 

It’s important to us that our brand reflects what we do and why. Our refresh was inspired by our network, which has grown significantly over the past eight years. 

We continue to embrace a circular economy by recognising the value of the materials we recover, whether we transform them into closed-loop products, donate proceeds to people in need, embrace a workforce of supported employees or contribute to restoring confidence to people suffering from medically-induced hair loss through our ponytail donation program.

Our conscious supporters will appreciate our changes to the number one Salon Directory in Australia and New Zealand. We’ve upgraded the directory to include social media links, direct booking links and an option for personalised imagery so that you can decide right then and there whether the salon you’re considering is right for you. This change makes discovering sustainable services via a Sustainable Salon easier than ever. 

Developing our new brand was a team-wide effort. We embarked on a months-long discovery process to decide how and what to change. We consulted our network of members and customers to understand how we can best provide the services they know and love us for. Our team also had extensive input. We asked ourselves, ' what’s our vision for Sustainable Salons?’ ‘What can we achieve with this amazing network we’ve built up?’ 

It was important to us to partner with innovative and sustainable service providers. We wanted to put our money where our mouth is and channelled the funds for our brand re-fresh into organisations that align with our vision. We were incredibly fortunate to partner with some truly inspiring organisations to help and guide us on our journey. 

• FROST*Collective helped us articulate and define precisely who we are as a brand. We chose them due to their extensive experience working with profit-for-purpose brands like ours in the Australian context. 
• TMRRW and Something helped us shape our new website into a platform we can be proud of - our new website has a low environmental impact thanks to TMRRW’s expertise in this area. 
• UserWay makes our website accessible to those with vision and hearing impairments, dyslexia, epilepsy and other accessibility needs. 
• Our updated typography is Pangea. Its designer, Christoph Koeberlin, has pledged twenty-five per cent of royalties to reforestation programs. 

Working with these organisations meant we knew our brand refresh was happening in line with our values as a for-purpose organisation. 

As we went through the brand refresh process, it became clear that there was one area we wanted to prioritise - inclusivity. While it’s always been one of our core values, we felt we could be more deliberate with how inclusivity is portrayed in our branding. At our core, that’s our goal - to make sustainability inclusive and accessible to everyone, no matter their abilities, background, race, gender expression, or sexuality. 

For us, sustainability isn't an add-on, it is part of our day-to-day, inherent in everything we do. 

We worked with talented designers to develop new gender-neutral avatars to ensure we broadcast this message loud and clear. These avatars represent the diversity and beauty of our customers - and, of course, they all have great hair! 

Our logo was also due for an update. We thought long and hard about conveying the essence of what we do at Sustainable Salons in an icon, and we’re beyond pleased with the result. Whether you see it representing a closed-loop, a hair tie, or a Hair Boom is up to you. To us, it represents being in rhythm. That’s what we strive for - to work in rhythm with our customers, the planet's needs and our members' profit margin because, yes, even sustainable businesses need to turn a profit to survive. 

The Salon Directory is not all that’s changed on our website. It’s been updated to ensure mobile navigation is as seamless as on desktop because we now know that about 65 per cent of our customers are accessing our website on a mobile device. This will lead to a more seamless user experience. 

Our new brand reflects who we are as an organisation - enthusiastic about the change we want to bring about in the world, approachable, friendly, inclusive, and kind. Book your next sustainable hair, dermal or pet grooming service through our improved Salon Directory and see our brand refresh in action.