Meet Jarrod Fisher

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jarrod Fisher. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jarrod below.

Jarrod, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?
Keeping creativity alive after 25 years behind the chair is a challenge. Burnout, unrealistic demands from clients, entitled salon owners and coworkers with harmful agendas can all stifle the creative process. For me knowing what I want from my own career path has allowed me to focus on productive measures and tune out the counter productive efforts of those around me. Through this focus I’ve learned and nurtured two aspects that keep my creativity flowing, understanding that my job is first and foremost to serve those who accept my services and that education at any level and at any stage of my career is imperative. Understanding as a service provider I’m in the service of others and not my ego or IG feed, provides a level of patience and empathy with every client I work with which allows me to see them, to listen to them and ultimately put them first. When that happens then the client experience turns into something magical for them and the results always speak for themselves, while a lack of education combined with ego creates a pedantic state of mind that cripples creativity and the stylist/client relationship. Proper education is instrumental because I know I need to have as many tools in my toolbox as possible that supports my clients’ expectations and is also crucial in helping me to understand what I don’t want to market as a service in my chair. When these two components are in place for me I become like a well oiled machine operating at my peak and open to what I can do for my clients, which in turn fuels my business and in turn fuels me to keep the creative process open and alive.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I can’t say that I chose hair styling as a career, but rather hair styling chose me. Everytime my parents took me to the salon as a kid I was so enamored with the environment and thought hair stylists were the coolest people. One day my parents asked me at the ripe age of 11 if I wanted to work in a hair salon, to which I emphatically said yes. The next week they told me they made arrangements with the salon owner of the salon we went to that I could work there for a few hours on Saturdays and Sundays and I thought I had won the lottery. My job was to dust the retail shelves, sweep up the hair, rinse perm rods and help keep the salon looking clean. This quickly turned into a passion to learn how I could do more, to be a member of such a cool team. Unfortunately at 11 years old I wasn’t ready for the responsibility of being behind the front desk and certainly couldn’t work on a client, so I did what I could knowing that someday this would be a part of my story. Cut to 16 years old and I’m in a new city getting my hair cut at a new salon and with the same awe I had at 11, found myself working as a receptionist after school and saw with more mature eyes the power of the salon experience for clients. Two years later I enrolled in cosmetology school after graduating high school and in another year made the leap from receptionist to assistant with an actual cosmetology license hanging on a salon wall. My time as an assistant wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be coming from the front desk because now I had to actually learn something I wasn’t good at doing. I had a fire in me after spending years in the salon wanting to be behind the chair and now I was closer than ever, but felt farther away than ever. There were a few times I ran into the bathroom to cry and I struggled to prove myself before my time, but with the guidance of some very talented and patient people as my mentors, I began to understand the importance of the advanced education I was fortunate enough to be receiving. Being an assistant is when I truly began to understand that you can give a man a fish and feed him for a day or teach him how to fish and feed him for a lifetime. I wanted to feed for a lifetime so I gave myself into the harsh reality that I needed to learn how to be a great hair stylist, both in skillset and chair side manner. It was a long journey and one that at this stage of my career I wouldn’t trade for being on the floor sooner than my time. Now 25 years later I see how important learning one’s craft is to the success of a long term career versus a short term job and in learning to nurture my craft, I also learned how to nurture relationships with my clients which in turn has kept me fresh and motivated behind the chair many years later. Education is key and learning to find the right mentor(s) that support and elevate the learning process as a lifelong endeavor that yields to years of growth, self realization and fulfillment as a hair stylist and an individual.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Looking back the three most impactful aspects of my journey were learning to get out of my own way, learning to approach my career as a service provider instead of a superstar and most importantly education. To be of service to others in any capacity I think it’s important to get out of one’s own way. This means putting personal struggles and ego aside so that I can be open to learning instead of trying to prove what I think I already now which allows for the growth and evolution of my craft. Approaching a career as a service provider instead of a superstar means knowing that the client comes first. This doesn’t mean the client always gets what they want, but in being a professional who has my clients best interest at heart this means that my clients can trust me and trust is key in building long term and fruitful relationships with the people that have supported me for over two decades. Finally education is a fundamental part of being a hair stylist and professionally guiding clients to realize how impactful individualized and bespoke work can be when helping one to feel their most beautiful. Education also allows us to recognize when we are being bombarded with trends and marketing made to make us feel like if we aren’t chasing someone else’s image than we don’t matter. I buck the social media noise meant to sell us something which is just a cookie cutter approach to one’s work and serves the hair stylist over the client and instead choose to look at each individual client so I can create work that is truly customized to them. Individuality is inherently beautiful and in order to create that beauty for our clients we must learn how to develop and nurture those harder to grasp concepts behind the chair.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
One book that was recommended to me by hair legend Beth Minardi and that I recommend to anyone behind the chair is, “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster”. It’s not a book about hair styling, but a commentary on what luxury is and how the idea of luxury has become distorted and corrupted by the mass market of trends and labels. After reading this book I realized that luxury isn’t in a price tag, it’s not a label, it’s not recreating someone else’s experience, but creating an experience for my clients that is truly customized to them and their needs. Luxury is customization as referenced by this book in how women would visit a Christian Dior salon in the 1950’s and have their dresses tailored to them in a private suite by highly trained professionals who put the results of their work above the validation of their egos. In a way I learned the importance of being an understated luxury brand by ignoring today’s standards of common place luxury with an emphasis on the notion that the client always comes first.

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Image Credits
Image credits: Jarrod J Salon

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