Tony Wood Hair: putting the name above the door

After a decade and a half of trade at 88 Castle Road, Tony moved into the iconic clocktower just down the street, initially under the ‘United Salons’ brand. He finally put his name above the door of the hairdressers in 2013, adopting the beautiful scissor logo, which was based on Tony’s first ever pair of hairdressing scissors. The logo has become well-recognised, and every stylist on the team at the time got the scissor permanently inked on their skin!

“When I started my business, it was considered uncool to use your own name. Also, I guess I wasn’t confident enough to do so just yet. It took some fairly big changes before I felt confident with merging my identity with the salon brand. Looking back years later, I’m so glad I did.”

When EGO was in full flow in the late nineties, Tony had assembled a group of local salon owners to form a co-operative with the sole aim of raising standards of hairdressers in the Portsmouth area. It was while doing this that he formed a firm friendship with Mike Saunders, owner of ‘Yellow Strawberry Hairdressing’, a brilliant salon on Hayling Island.

“I had first met Mike on a youth training scheme when we were both 16. We didn’t keep in touch at the time, but our careers went on to follow near-identical paths. I never had a business partner at the start of any of my ventures, but Mike was the best of both worlds — he was as much an ever-supportive friend as he was a constant source of business inspiration and companionship.

“Mike and I outgrew the co-operative and started strengthening our businesses, putting on shows, doing photoshoots, and developing our education scheme. These forays in the hairdressing industry have taken us all over the world. We’ve had some crazy times!

“He’s the brother I never had.” It was when Mike said he wanted to move to Denmark that Tony finally considered shifting from ‘United Salons’ to ‘Tony Wood Hair’. The past (EGO) didn’t feel right, and the present (United Salons) just wasn’t sticking, and so the future, Tony Wood Hair, was born. Today, the name can be spotted wrapping around the full stretch of the clocktower building, brilliantly signwritten in white on black.

Pete Codling, a local artist whose studio is just next door to where EGO thrived in the nineties, painted the scissor logo loud and proud on an awning over the salon doors, visible from the other end of the Castle Road. Thus, we’ve reached the Tony Wood Hair of today.

The next few doors of the Tony Wood Advent calendar will explore some big things Tony and his team have achieved over the past four years. Our next giveaway is coming up, too, worth £300, so be sure to subscribe to our newsletter below to get notified when the competition goes live!