HJ Careers

adventures of a… BOUNDARY Breaker

Tom Connell’s hairdressing career began with a pair of football boots! Here, he shares his creative processes, advice to young hairdressers, and what he’s got lined up…

“I remember I really wanted these football boots. I asked my dad for the money and he said ‘If you work at the salon for three days, you’ll have enough money to buy them’, so I did,” shares Tom Connell when HJ asks where his career began. Turns out, the football career didn’t go anywhere, but after three days in his mum and dad’s salon, his hairdressing career did. “Saturdays got me hooked,” he says. “I liked being around the older people that dressed differently to anyone that was in my small town in the north of England – everyone just seemed cool.” And so, from the age of 13 he never left the salon.

It was only when he finished school that he moved to Andrew Collinge in Manchester. “Living in the centre of Manchester felt like I’d moved to New York at the time,” he says. After seeing Trevor Sorbie on stage Tom knew he wanted more. “I was blown away by him doing what I thought were impossible things,” he tells us. “I said to my dad, I want to do what he’s doing, I want to work for him.”

He managed to get a job with Trevor and that's where he really started to learn his craft. “He always used to say: ‘It’s like driving a car – you don’t learn when you pass your test, you start learning afterwards’.” But something else that was always in the back of Tom’s mind was photography. “I wanted to do hair shows in a different way to how I felt they were being done. I asked my wife if I could take all of our savings and use them to put on my own hair show. We hired a little theatre in Chelsea, I shot a collection and some videos with my friends,” he reminisces, telling us he had no idea what he was doing having never put on a show before – but it soon paid off. “I got Trevor’s attention and he asked me to be his Assistant Art Director.” Just one year later, Tom became Global Art Director, helping to build an art team, all while being mentored by the four-times winner of British Hairdresser of the Year, sponsored by Schwarzkopf Professional.

Then came Davines. Tom became their Art Director six years ago and has lived in Italy with his family for the last four years. A typical day in the life? “The first thing I do in my studio at the Davines village in Parma, is sit with a coffee and look at my wall. I have a magnetic wall in my studio where I pin all my ideas and projects and look at where things are going. Then I might have a day where we’re on set, or it could be something like this week where I’m going to Mexico to present our latest campaign.”

Naturally, our next question is where Tom finds his inspiration. “I think the hardest thing for anyone to do is come up with a style of work that’s recognisably theirs. I think the only way you can do that, especially as a hairdresser, is to use your interests outside of hairdressing and bring them into it,” he explains. “Everyone is an individual person, our taste in clothes, film and music – you have to try and pull from them. If anything catches my attention, I make a note of it, take a quick photograph, and file it. Then once a month, I’ll go through that file and there tends to be a red thread through the things you’ve noticed.”

His advice for hairdressers starting out now? Take an original path. “I’ve always tried to carve my own path in my career, whether that’s with the style of the hair or the style of photography I was doing which was kind of against the grain of what most people my age were doing,” he says. “If you take the same path as everyone else, you can’t expect to stand out. Make sure you’re saying something different, don’t look at what’s popular, make your own statement rather than looking at what people have done before you and doing a version of that.”

Looking at his own career path, the future looks set to keep him busy. “I’m in the early processes of working on the creative concepts of all the photography campaigns for this year. We’ve just launched a campaign so there’s a lot of travelling to Mexico, Amsterdam, Ireland, America and Japan! I love it, I can’t believe it’s my job actually – it’s nice to have your hobby as your job.” Seems that swapping the football pitch for the salon was the right move all along!