Jawed Habib is clearly excited about being in Chennai. He insists on giving everyone, including a baby, a (free) haircut. Snip, snip, snip and he’s done in less than three minutes, all the while giving tips on what style works best for them.
In the city, for the launch of his three new salons — in Valasaravakkam, OMR and Kilpauk — Habib talks about how “Hairstyling is a science.” He says, “From what I’ve studied, for Indians, there are a few styles that work. It’s all about getting that right, in as short a time as possible.”
This flies in the face of everything that most people believe is necessary to be trendy: spending at least an hour in a salon as the stylist painstakingly ensures that not a strand of hair is uneven, getting the latest asymmetric blunt bob or military-style tight fade. His philosophy must be working. He currently has almost 500 salons in 24 states, spread across 92 cities. “We’re also in the U.K., Singapore and the UAE. Ten to 15 thousand students pass through our academies every year and are hired by other brands. Tell that to anyone who thinks an Indian brand can’t be trendy and international while being affordable,” Habib smirks.
“My business is headquartered in Mumbai, my family is in Delhi and I live on airplanes. In fact, that’s the only time I get to write my books, as I have no distraction of the Internet or my phone,” says the energetic 52-year-old, who is the first to laugh at his own quips. The stylists in the salon are clearly star-struck, laughing in the background like a live studio audience, even breaking into applause when he says anything particularly dramatic. For instance, when he says, “Wherever there is hair, Jawed Habib is there.”
Although he is the third generation of his family to be in the business of hair, it was not something that he was attracted to at once. While his grandfather and father were both hairdressers, serving people like Lord Linlithgow and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru respectively, it wasn’t something Habib could see himself doing. But on a visit to London, he discovered the glamorous side of hairstyling, and enrolled in the Morris School of Hairdressing. “There was a girl with long, blonde hair; I was trying to impress her, she was trying to impress me, and that’s how we both became hairstylists. But she’s not my wife,” he laughs cheekily.
Ask him if he felt any pressure from having a family heritage to uphold, and he replies, “No. Simply because my dada was only a hairdresser and my father was working for some big group. The difference is that I have made it a corporate house besides making a business out of it. Since I’m not following exactly what they did, there is no pressure. I wanted to be a star myself.”
The inspiration to run a highly organised business model in what is an unorganised sector in India came from his time working at McDonalds in London. “I was doing an MBA and learning about their system, and I put that into practice in my own business. Our asset is our population and we are so passionate about work. I wanted to market haircuts like the way they market burgers.” His asset, says Habib, is that he is “a technical person, a businessman, an educator. I do everything.”
And Habib is not stingy with his knowledge: given a choice between hairstyling and teaching hairstyling, he says he would pick the latter any day. “For me, it’s important to teach the next wave of stylists. Hair science stops with the cosmetic companies, but I want all stylists to be trained in it.”
On future plans, he says, “I only live for today, so I want to do the best I can in everything I do each day, be it teaching or running my business, or making sure India is stylish every day.”
