19 March 2024

CROP21: Inspiring Creativity in Salon Beginners

CROP21 is a creative move by multi-award-winning hairdresser and renowned educator Paul Falltrick to help young hairdressing professionals to find their creative essence really early in their career.

Tasks that can be mundane and feel far away from the creative career that they aspire to. By putting creativity into the mix from day one can really excite. In short, the thinking of CROP21 makes way for a veritable harvest of creative youngsters of the future; who belong, stay and grow within the industry.

The word crop conjures immediate pictures of production and growth; in this sense, crop has references in relation to relation to seeding, feeding, growing and ready for a bumper harvest of keen, excited and cared for talent. This is how CROP came about – also forming an acronym for:

Creativity:
To give a creative experience early and consistently;

Resilience:
To build boldness and opportunity to put your creative self on display;

Opportunity:
A chance to experiment, to grow confidence in creative expression;

Purpose:
To find our sense of purpose as a hairdresser and feel the creative excitement early on.

Paul Falltrick considered the role that hairdressers can play in changing up the offering to young hairdressers; shifting the approach. In his own early career Paul remembers having very early exposure to creative opportunities.

The Crop programme has been thought through to provide a positive, encouraging environment; one in which to experiment with peers who are also putting themselves out there – to learn from each other. The purpose of CROP is to connect youngsters with the life-blood of hairdressing: creativity.

“Every hairdresser is acutely aware of how little in-take there is within the industry. I feel strongly that we need to look at ourselves and take responsibility for this; in terms of really owning up to why we are not meeting young hairdressers’ needs,” commented Paul.

Providing the Vital Opportunites

One of the key reasons that Falltrick believes the industry is ‘getting it wrong’ is that aspiring, young hairdressers are not getting the opportunity to step into creative work early enough and so their interest wanes and they leave. He believes offering a creative intervention and opportunity early can open up the excitement; feeding the creative spirit in these young future hairdressers.

The first intake creative session of CROP21 was in October 2021, with two immersive educational days for 6 complete ‘newbies’, who had just left college. These six keen individuals also found the space and encouragement to express creatively using mannequin heads (kindly supplied by Zen Hair) and the days flew with the youngsters creating mood-boards, cutting, applying colour artistically and even adding extensions. As a follow-up, the team of six also got the chance to join the Essex hairdressing community of hairdressers at the Essex Hairdressing Event on Monday 1st November.

“The team felt they wanted to show and discuss their work, but didn’t feel ready to step into presenting themselves, what is very important about CROP21 is that it is all about encouragement and meeting the youngsters where they are, nudging them forward but very much is not about over-whelming them! I am so proud of them, they did good!” concluded Paul.

If you are interested in being part of the next CROP sessions contact Paul direct on @paulfalltrick @gfchairdressing @ministryofhairacademy and prepared to be encouraged, inspired and to get your creative juices flowing.

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