Interview With Travis Parker

Introduction

Rebekah: I am so excited to get to interview Travis Parker today. He has been in the beauty industry for over 35 years, and he’s known for his transformative work and his strong relationships with his clients and his peers. Over a decade ago, he opened his own salon in Solana Beach, California, and then six years later, he started the Travis Parker Academy. Travis has had some amazing collaborations, starting with his role as a brand ambassador and top educator for Toni & Guy, and then he worked with L’Oréal Professionnel, and currently he’s an ambassador with Arc Scissors. I am so excited to get to interview you, Travis. Thank you so much for giving me this time with you.

Travis: Thank you so much. Oh my gosh, I’m so lucky to be here. Thank you.

Falling into hairdressing

Rebekah: So Travis, did you always want to be a hairdresser? Salon owner, educator, is this something that you’ve always wanted to do? Tell me a little bit about that.

Travis: No, I fell into the hairdressing world when I was a teenager. So many of my friends, we were basically just copying what our influencers were, and that was rock stars back then. We were influenced by a lot of goth music and punk rock and heavy metal, and so we looked like those people. Not having resources financially, or salons to go to where I grew up, we would do each other’s hair. One of my friends, that led him to school, and he kind of talked me into it, and at the age of 16, I started school.

I think, like so many of us out there, I discovered right away that I had found my medium. I was always drawn to artistic things and creative direction, and clearly adorning my body with my own style, but I didn’t know that I would appreciate it as an artisan, in that tactile sense. And so right out of the gate, I was really connected to it, but I was led into it, not really thinking I’d ever be a hairdresser.

And then teaching was kind of the same way. I just kept having friends that introduced me to teaching and wanted me to tell them what I was doing. And I was really shy, I was very introverted. I could tell you what I was doing with that blow dryer, that haircut, but if you put three more people next to you, I would go into a panic attack. I was very uncomfortable speaking in public, or anybody looking at me as a facilitator, as an educator. It was really awkward for me. I never felt smart enough, and so how could I be that person?

Overcoming the fear of teaching

Rebekah: So how did you overcome that fear?

Travis: How did I overcome it? I mean, it’s been a process, right? Like most things, in order to develop strength, it comes through rinse and repeat, and rehearsal, and discomfort, and acceptance, and tenacity, and all those bonus words. And it took wanting to overcome it from the front end. It kept positioning itself as something that I was supposed to do, and I don’t like to be adequate at things. I like to find my strongest self in it, and I usually find that strength through time. So as it presented itself, I kept going for it, and it was really dreadful and uncomfortable, and I was probably dreadful and uncomfortable to listen to. But I wanted to find my best self in it, and through a lot of practice and rehearsal, I eventually found a little bit more comfortability.

Even today, I still get nervous with everything I do, but I know that I’m not gonna die, and I know that my audience is there for whatever they signed up for. I’ve learned to not make it about me. I’ve learned to make it about them, because that’s why they’re there. I’m just a carrier of that information, a facilitator in that position. If I get too nervous, I realize I’m being selfish, and it’s not about me, it’s not about my nerves. It’s about driving that information to help people. So, a lot of rehearsal.

Rebekah: That’s really true what you said. I think when we are nervous, it is oftentimes because we’re thinking about ourselves, and that’s really selfish. And so when we think about our audience, when we think about serving them, then it becomes something smoother and easy, right?

Travis: Yeah, for sure. A lot of it had to do with the way I was brought up and grew up, but I felt stupid. I didn’t feel like I was smart enough to be in a role where people would listen to me. And every bit of my success today has come through failure. It came through trial and error, and the key ingredient to all of it is just never giving up. I think a lot of times people will look at you where you’re at, but not understand that process or that journey. But every bit of that journey has put me in the place that I’m in today. Again, it all started with insecurity and not feeling smart enough, and I didn’t want to flop in anything. So how was I going to get past it? How was I going to show up?

Mentors and learning from others

Rebekah: Travis, did you have any mentors that helped you along on your journey?

Travis: Yes and no. I never had anybody that I was looking up to and thought, oh my gosh, that person would be a great mentor, and then called them up and said, hey, look, mentor me, and I’ll pay you money. So I never had a coach that I had hired. But indirectly, I was always a great shadow, always looking up to people that I wanted to be more like. I was always there, and I think for any coach or any mentor, when you see a student that’s always there, you want to support them. The easiest person to teach is a student that wants to learn. And so in that student role, I surrounded myself with people that I thought were excellent, and indirectly, so many people became influences in my life.

So I don’t think coaching or mentorship necessarily has to be paid for. For those of my friends out there that make money in it, they’re at a place of excellence with organized information that really leads you through a process, I think in a shorter amount of time, with intention. But in so many ways, it’s free. Just surround yourself with people that are awesome, that you look up to, and then, with best practices in place, try to dissect what theirs are and put them into action for yourself.

The best and hardest parts of the work

Rebekah: What has been your favorite part of the work that you do, and what has been your least favorite part of it?

Travis: Oh, that’s a crazy question. How much time do we have in this podcast? My favorite part is easy. That’s hair. I love doing hair, and I say that with hairdresser glasses on. My favorite part of teaching is sharing with others and helping to compel them, or offer them information that leads them to that next place of success, to find predictability in their work. So those are my favorite parts.

The harder parts are that, like so many of us out there, we’re entrepreneurs, and so we are running every facet of our business. There are so many different integral things that go into a successful business that make it all come together in the end. And bookkeeping and financing are my two. This is my nemesis, this is my kryptonite. I hate money, which I know I’m not supposed to say, I’ve been taught not to say, but it’s true. I don’t like doing things for money. I like doing things because I’m passionate about it, and money has always been a byproduct of what’s come from passion.

Right now, yesterday and today and tomorrow, I’m working on Google Analytics 4, updating my website with all this site footer code that allows me to find analytics on traffic to and from my site, what happens, and the habits of it. And a lot of that stuff is way over my pay scale. So that’s the stuff that I don’t love.

I’m a workaholic in the sense that I do what I love. But sometimes I don’t love that I love it so much. I wish I loved personal life more sometimes, but I find so much content and happiness in working that it’s beautiful on one end. But if I was to compare my balance to other people’s balance that may appreciate personal life more, they’re literally incomparable. What drives me to work so hard is the fact that I love hair and I love hairdressers. And now I’ve got a lot of information, and I am blessed to be in a position that I can share it. But there’s a lot of things that come along with owning a company that are really taxing and above my pay grade.

Right now we’re recording a podcast. There’s a lot of things that go into this that you’re having to think about. You and I, before we hopped on live, were talking about social media. I appreciate social media, but I don’t love social media. I love doing hair. But I realized that in order to move my product to hairdressers, I’ve got to flow with their river and find my place in it. That’s not always something that I love to do. I’m not a person that’s just flipping through my phone and looking at a bunch of random stuff. I look at my phone with a sense of intention for what it is that I want to see at that moment. I don’t like the minutia in between, and so it’s hard for me sometimes to report to that. I could go on for days.

Social media and getting help

Rebekah: Well, you couldn’t tell, Travis, because you do a great job on social media. You couldn’t tell that you don’t like it.

Travis: Oh my God, you’re so sweet. Well, I have a person that helps me tremendously. When I have to do a spoken word video, I’ve gotten used to my face in front of a phone or a camera, and I can find my sense of authentic in that moment. But editing and all the other processes, adding titles and lower thirds and writing captions, all those things aren’t my favorite part. Or doing a dance to a song and lip syncing it, or doing a lip, whatever it’s called, to an actor’s voice or something like that. I would rather pull my skin off.

Rebekah: Yeah, I think it’s one of those things that we have to do. It’s important to represent your brand online, but it is something that a lot of people don’t have time for, and it’s not something that everybody loves doing. So you’re not alone in that. And that’s one of the reasons I offer what I do, because it is taking that burden off of your shoulders, but still giving you that opportunity to represent your brand in the best light possible.

Travis: Well, and we need people like you, right? We need you because you love something that we don’t love. You will get a better end result from somebody that loves something than somebody that hates something. Maybe you will find that rare occasion where it doesn’t really work out like that. But if we can find people that love what we don’t, the sum of those efforts will be much greater. And we need all these different elements in order for a product to be seen, for it to be heard, and for there to be a consistent message in it every day. So yeah, we need friends like you.

Rebekah: Thank you.

Advice for new hairdressers: patience and relevance

Rebekah: Travis, what would you say is the most important piece of advice that you would give to someone who is wanting to go into the beauty industry?

Travis: That’s a good one. This is probably common sense, but in a huge sense, patience is a massive thing. We tend to want a result faster than it’s going to happen. And then when we don’t get it, we burn out and we’re like, it doesn’t ever happen for me. Which so much reflects back on what I had said earlier about loving what we do. If we find purpose in what we do, that’s just our process. And if we understand that a process is just that, it’s not an overnight moment. Is success supposed to happen when we think it’s supposed to happen? Or does life give us what we need, not necessarily what we want? And so patience is a massive, massive part of it.

And at the same time, I’ve said this a lot lately because it’s become relevant: if we don’t stay relevant, we become irrelevant. Continuing to understand our marketplace, continuing to understand what their habits are, allows us to navigate our product more natively, or more naturally, right into their hands. So stay relevant, stay patient, and understand that this is a process, and processes take time. You take anything out of the oven too soon, and it’s not done, regardless of how fast you want it to be, no matter how hungry you are.

Rebekah: I think it’s interesting. I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how a lot of the up-and-coming artists in the industry are thinking that things will happen a lot faster. They’re going to be a celebrity overnight. And I think what you talked about with having patience is so important, because it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and a lot of work and a lot of perseverance. You have to push through things that are challenging and not give up. And I think a lot of people don’t always know that right away when they’re just coming out of beauty school. They think, I’m going to be a celebrity, or I’m going to be a star. And it’s not like that.

Travis: Yeah. Grace is the word that came to mind when you were speaking. Have grace with yourself, you know what I mean? Be gentle with yourself, because again, it is a journey. It’s a process. What happens if you reach success tonight, and all of a sudden you’ve got this huge microphone? You’re on top of the hill. What do you have to say? What experiences have you had that have led you to that moment to share with other people? If it just happened to you, there’s nothing to teach anyone else, and then it’s just all about you. You get to the top of any mountain and you’re up there looking at the next highest mountain, but then it’s downhill before it’s uphill again. And that becomes your journey that you can share and teach other people at another point in time.

So enjoy the day, find what you love, stick to what makes you happy. And when it’s meant to be, it will be. And until then, you’re living this great life that we as hairdressers are blessed to live. Because in a lot of other careers, people are dreadfully unhappy, and at least we get to do what we love every day.

Rebekah: But stardom isn’t really the answer. It’s about enjoying the journey.

Travis: That’s right. And learning the life lessons that come throughout the falling down and then getting back up, all of that.

Weaknesses that became strengths

Rebekah: What would you say is the most important life or business lesson that you’ve learned throughout your career?

Travis: Life or business lesson? One of the things that I learned was that my greatest weaknesses have become my greatest strengths. They’ve become almost my superpowers. The things that I could have given up on, I’ve realized, have become some of my greatest offerings and my greatest levels of talent. They were the things that I really had to figure out. They were the things that I really had to study. They were things where I had to fight my demons inside to learn how to overcome. So I think my greatest life lessons have come from understanding that I need to stop resisting and just keep showing up and reporting to it, and realizing that development and growth is generally uncomfortable. But again, with grit, we learn a lot about ourselves in those moments. And my life lessons are to believe in myself, and never stop, never give up. It’s forever. It’s my journey.

Rebekah: That’s good.

What keeps him going: purpose and family

Rebekah: What keeps you motivated and inspired to continue doing your work?

Travis: Oh my God, these are good questions. I can’t give up. It’s something that’s now ingrained in me. When I’ve started something, I have to see it through, to a painful point for others around me at times. I will forever try to finish what I’ve started and forever try to figure it out.

At this point, what keeps me motivated is knowing that I’ve got incredible information, like my certification process with cutting, that can genuinely help people. So I battle the marketing world to position my brand name so that we can offer more information to more people to help them through their processes. In a time when we’ve got so much information, it becomes convoluted at times, and we don’t really know how to find a resource that’s going to truly help us get from one place to another. And so I’m highly motivated to get our name out there so that we can help more people.

And then I’ve got a little guy that’s 12. He is a huge part of it. As much as he won’t understand why until he’s much older, I try to live by example of never giving up and making things happen, and showing him that it is a process, that it doesn’t happen overnight. So I would say family is a big part of it. And then knowing I’ve got something that’s valuable, and it’s just a matter of how I position it to offer to more people. That really keeps me going.

Rebekah: I love what you said about family. I have two little ones too. It’s like they’re watching us. And that does keep you motivated to not quit, not give up even when things are tough, because you want them to not quit when things get tough. And so you want to lead by example and endure even when it’s hard, and not quit.

Travis: Well, 100%. And this is my opinion, but for my son to see me struggle is an invaluable thing for a child to see in their mentor or their parent. Because again, life’s not easy. As soon as you’re 18 and up, life doesn’t give you a participation award. It just doesn’t. Life gives you a punch in the nose. And so when you are struggling and you’re going through hard times, but you endure and you get through it, your child, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, is watching this happen. And that’s something that starts to embed in their way of reporting to things, like, oh, okay, well, it’s hard for my dad, it’s hard for whomever, and that’s just part of the process. Expecting it not to be is not realistic in so many situations.

For a lot of us, maybe things just happen, but for me, nothing just happens. And I think it’s invaluable for my child to be privy to that, that it’s a journey. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes I’ve got to work when I want to play. Sometimes I fail before I succeed. Sometimes I put a video out on Instagram and it gets 100 views, and sometimes I put a video out on Instagram and it gets 500,000 views. That’s all part of the ebb and the flow of it all, and I think it’s either directly or indirectly inspiration.

Rebekah: Yeah. I think when you see someone fall down, or admit mistakes, or admit failures, that’s inspiring. It makes you not quit when you fall down. So I think it’s really important to let our kids see that, and let them see that we rise back up. We fall down, we may mess up and make a lot of mistakes along the way, but we’re not quitting. And so that’s really inspiring, I think, for them.

Travis: Yeah, it’s inspiring what you just said. What happens in that moment when you [inaudible] and you’re bleeding on the knees, or you broke your arm? It’s in that moment that they’re watching. What do you do next? What happens in that moment that takes you to that next moment? I think that’s that pinnacle space of time that is so crucial, that we are present so that they can see it. Keep pushing.

In the business of self-esteem

Rebekah: What would you say is the most exciting and rewarding part of what you do in the beauty industry?

Travis: Making people happy, improving people’s self-esteem, helping people find their next moment, helping people appreciate what they have, all those things. I’ve always said I’m in the business of self-esteem. Working with people to help them find what makes them feel confident when they walk into the world is a beautiful responsibility, and for that, I’m blessed. As a coach, facilitator, mentor, teacher, having information that helps people find their aha and their why is just an incredible thing. It really is a blessed purpose that I get to live in either of those two roles.

Rebekah: It’s awesome.

Quick questions: coffee, pizza and a book

Rebekah: Okay, here’s a fun question. Are you a coffee or a tea person?

Travis: I think this is video, right? Here’s my coffee. Here’s my tea. I drink this stuff called mud water, which is like a masala chai tea. And then at night I have chamomile tea. But when I really need to get the motor running, there’s my espresso.

Rebekah: That’s hilarious. So you have both of them?

Travis: Yeah, all of the above.

Rebekah: Okay, here’s another funny question. If you had one meal to eat the rest of your life, what would that meal be?

Travis: Oh my God, it would have to be chicken. I eat a lot of chicken. If we ever got rid of all the chickens, I’d really struggle to find a plan B. One meal? Oh, one meal for the rest of your life. Boy, isn’t that a loaded question. What would I eat every day for the rest of my life? If I never had to worry about getting the fat stomach and the fat back, which I do tend to harbor and carry, I would probably say pizza. Pizza is probably one of my favorite things.

Rebekah: What kind of pizza?

Travis: Well, I love a prosciutto and arugula pizza. So prosciutto is pretty much the top of the list. I’d put pepperoni in there as the second thing, because I still like pepperoni pizza, because I’m a little child. Still eats kids’ meals.

Rebekah: Yeah, but you have an excuse, because you have a 12-year-old. So sometimes you’re just eating whatever they’re eating, right?

Travis: Yeah. I’m obsessed with a rigatoni pasta right now from North Italia. That’s here in San Diego. I think I’ve eaten it four times in the last two weeks, and I keep going back to it.

Rebekah: The best pizza that we had was in La Jolla, and it was American Pizza Manufacturer. It’s amazing. It’s in La Jolla. Go and get it sometime. It’s worth it. You actually take the pizza home and cook it yourself. But it’s so good. We really miss that place a lot.

Travis: Oh my goodness. I’m going to try it.

Rebekah: I’ll put it on ice and send it to you.

Travis: That would be amazing.

Rebekah: Okay, so here’s another question. If you had to write a book tomorrow, what would that book be about?

Travis: It seems to be an ongoing theme right now, but I think I would write it on endurance and, again, enjoying the process. Loving what you do is a really huge thing. And in that book, it would definitely cover how loving what you do also comes with painful moments, because you’re always pushing to be your greatest self in loving what you do. There’s also an acceptance that not everything is fun.

I was on a call earlier this morning, and we were talking about a lot of different things. I’m working with Spotify on some stuff right now. And they said, if we could take any of the responsibilities out of your life, what would they be? I had this list of things that I didn’t love. But in my book, I’m not really sure I would say we should take those away, because those are the things where you learn about what makes the entire motor run. And if that’s what gets you to where you’re needing to go, that’s invaluable.

Also in that book of tenacity and grit and journey, it would be about learning about the things that I don’t love, which allows me to delegate things with a sense of understanding and clarity on what it is that I’m giving to somebody else or hiring out. So I think my book would be about: life’s a journey. It’s a process. Love what you do, and accept the challenging aspects of it as well, because everything will have those challenges. But those usually are what become our stories. As I mentioned earlier, the greatest challenges sometimes become our greatest superpowers, and that becomes incredible information for us to share with others.

Rebekah: I love that. I think a lot of times people want to stick with only what they’re good at, and we tend to do that. We want to avoid the pain, we want to avoid the hard times, things that we’re not good at. But the more that we push ourselves to do those things and face our fears, the better we get. We get stretched, and it develops our character, and it makes us better at who we’re supposed to be. So I love that you said that.

Travis: Well, 100%. But a massive part of my reality is that I wasn’t blessed with a fortune when I was born. And so for me, I can’t afford to delegate everything out. Just because I don’t love it doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be done. There’s so many things that I can’t pay other people to do, so I’ve got to figure it out myself. And then ultimately, at the end of the day, if I can get enough momentum going with everything, that propels the influx of cash so that I can delegate things out later on.

As an entrepreneur, for so many of us that are going to listen to this podcast right now, you’re going to be in a place, more often than not, where you can’t afford to delegate everything out that you don’t love. So loving things comes with all these other responsibilities. I love to be in shape, but it’s painful and brutal, and I can’t always have a private trainer. That’s just not in the cards always. So sometimes I’ve just got to deal with it and figure it out. Sometimes I dig online and say, okay, well, I’ve got cramps in this part of my body, how do I get rid of that? I can’t always hire out a professional to help me navigate through those moments. So I think so much of it is acceptance that you will have to do things you don’t love to do, based upon what you love doing. It’s all part of it.

Rebekah: And it will lead you to what you love. As you exercise those muscles… my husband calls them adventure muscles. They’re the parts of us that make us afraid, but we’re meant to do them. And if we just don’t give up and don’t quit, even when it’s hard, then it becomes something that you end up loving. I think a lot of what we do, we end up loving later.

Travis Parker Academy and Hairdressing Made Easy

Rebekah: So tell me a little bit more about Travis Parker Academy. I saw online you call it Hairdressing Made Easy, and I think that’s awesome. So tell us a little bit about that.

Travis: Thanks. It’s my dream come true. It goes back to all my stuff about purpose, and life presenting what you need, not necessarily what you ask for. The birth of TPA, Travis Parker Academy, was when I started dating a gal that lived in Texas, and I lived in California. And so I thought to myself, how am I going to be in Texas part time and in California part time? At that point, I had already been teaching for a long time. So I thought, okay, I need to have passive income, so that when I’m traveling and I’m on the road, I am still making money. That became the first idea.

And then I was like, okay, well, what am I going to teach? At that time, I was in my early to mid 40s. As I said earlier, you’re either relevant or you’re irrelevant. One of the things that I realized at my age is that I’m not living in a hipster world anymore. I’m not living at bars. I’m not going to clubs. I’m not consistently immersed in the world that I used to be immersed in. At an earlier stage, trend and what was happening was very easy for me, because I just looked around me. At this place in my life, I started to realize that if I did trend-based content, it wasn’t going to support the sale of this product, because I was the age of a lot of the parents of the people I was selling this content to.

But I had enough experience with teaching and enough experience with hair that I thought if I could defragment the processes of how we teach and learn haircutting, maybe I would be onto something. And that’s when Hairdressing Made Easy was truly born. I started to script what I felt was an easier, more modulized way of learning haircutting. In the ever-changing world that we live in, with social and free content, as we talked about earlier, we are more immersed in tons of information, but none of it is really delivered in an organized manner. It’s like batch work. It’s like a collage wall. So if I could align all that to have a more concise and clear understanding, maybe I had something viable as a product.

The three cutting courses

Travis: So we started to teach in-person trainings of these courses, and there are three different courses. It’s kind of a beginner, intermediate, and advanced course. It’s called Hairdressing Made Easy, as you mentioned, and it’s cutting course one, two, and three, real basic verbiage. It leads us through what our relationship is to a haircut based upon an incentive, which is your trend, which is your aesthetic.

The first class teaches you the relationship of you to a haircut. It teaches you the language of haircutting, so that we can convey a message with clarity and have a concise ability to understand what’s being said. We have what we call the three elements of every haircut, and in the very first course we learn how to reverse engineer any haircut that we’re looking at and break it into the three elements. From there, we start to use all these ideologies as a practical exercise, and we break that down through six unique cuts.

In our second pillar, we start to understand more about texturizing, personalization, hair per square inch, porosity, formation of wave and curl patterns versus straight hair, so we can understand the application of all of this, in theory, to a practical sense of personalization.

And then cutting course three, our final pillar, continues to advance your technical skills by offering more high-level, advanced ways of approaching hair. But it really celebrates the individual artist. Cutting course three is truly about how we take all of this content, curriculum, and way of thinking to build foreseeable end results in your aesthetic. A huge practice of mine is not to teach what I think is cool or what I think is relevant, but to help you find predictability in what you think is relevant. That, kind of full circle, is what we’re made of. That’s why I focused more on developing the architecture behind your artistry, versus teaching you about my artistry. I wanted to be more of the 101 on it.

That said, we have in-person trainings, and we have live online courses of this content. We have e-courses, which is e-learning content built on learning module software that tailors the student through an entire process. It’s absolutely amazing. Not the content, but the process is incredible. And the content, I think, is pretty good, really good. And then we have trend-based classes. And then I do on-location courses, so salons hiring me to go out and work with their teams, and brands hire me to go work with their facilitators and their educators. I work with Arc, as you mentioned in the beginning, and I get to stand on stage for them with BTC and all of the things that they do. And [inaudible] Milan this year, working with an Italian audience out there for a two-day workshop on all these principles and ideologies that we’ve written. We’re finding that we’ve got a good thing going on. It really helps to celebrate every individual artist, because it’s not positioning trend. It’s positioning quality content to help you find predictable results, less stress, and make more money.

Rebekah: That’s awesome.

Where to find Travis: website, YouTube and social

Rebekah: So finally, if someone wants to get involved with what you’re doing, should they just go to your website? Do you want to tell them what it is?

Travis: Yeah, totally. That’s the best way to do it. Our website’s TravisParkerAcademy.com, and that’s where everything’s nestled, where you can find all of our different assets and offerings. We’ve got a YouTube channel that we’ve been focusing on since January, and on Saturday we just launched our sixth long-form video. They’re haircut tutorials, and that is a huge focus for us right now. So we have free content on there. It’s our haircuts that we take into 10 to 20-minute videos, averaging 15-minute videos, so they’re diced up and edited. YouTube is a huge focus for us right now, and we’re staying very present.

Not to mention, we’re making fun content for YouTube as well. We’ve got a bunch in the bag right now that we haven’t launched yet, where we’re doing these fun hairdressing challenges, stepping out of the classroom and into the world in general, so to speak, where we’re creating a little bit more entertainment for our hairdressers. What the world has coined as edutainment. So a little bit of education, but entertainment at the same time. YouTube is a huge focus of ours. And then, of course, our social platforms, TravisParkerHair and TravisParkerAcademy, are on TikTok, Facebook, and of course IG.

The reaction videos that took off

Rebekah: Yeah, I saw your funny video that you did, I think it was with [name unclear], recently.

Travis: Oh, yeah, I made a bunch of those recently. That has turned into this whole thing. We’ve got one video right now that’s over 700,000 views. I think it’s 760,000 views, which is our biggest video so far. And I never thought it would be me breaking down other people’s haircuts.

In short, and I don’t know how much time we have, my editor was like, Travis, I want you to do reaction videos. And I was like, Ryan, I don’t want to get on there and make fun of people. That is not my juice. I’m a positive person, and I celebrate everybody. And it’s like, well, then celebrate everybody, just make it fun. And so I was thinking and thinking and thinking, how can I do this in a way that was really positive, but complemented our project, what we’re working on with Hairdressing Made Easy?

So I sat down, and at first, back to that, I felt insecure about it. I’m like, well, if I’m breaking down amazing humans and what their haircuts are, using my methodology, will they be offended that I’m doing that? And so I just kind of went for it. I did a couple of friends first, so I felt safe, and they wouldn’t punch me in the face, right? And they did really well, and everybody was laughing.

And the way reels are made, as you know, they’re 10 seconds to maybe a minute max. And to break down a whole haircut in a minute, that’s a project. So it turned into this whole thing where I was talking really fast, using our methodology. My language, my approach, the three elements as I talked about, length, layers and face framing, what these people were doing in the technical language, all became the funny. They make me laugh when I’m making them. And I don’t watch the entire video before I do it, so I kind of don’t know what’s going to happen by the end of it, and it makes it more fun. It makes it more fun and makes it more authentic. And it’s become an incredible way for us to exhibit what the language of our methodology is, and how we break down every single haircut on the planet.

Rebekah: Are they resharing what you’re putting out there as well?

Travis: Well, I’ve asked people a couple of times to be collaborators on it, and I haven’t had anybody collaborate yet. But I’ve had a number of them, and the majority of them will share it to their story. The one video that’s over, I’ll take a look at it right now. Let’s see, where is it? 770,000 views right now. And this was maybe three weeks ago. Let’s look at the stats together. Is it insights? Yes. So we’ve gotten 1,781 new followers from that one post. So almost 2,000 new followers from one post. And this is not me doing anything. There’s no editing. I didn’t hire anybody. This is someone else’s video, and I’m just using our methodology to break down that haircut. And it’s become edutainment. People are entertained by it and educated at the same time. And it’s working.

Rebekah: That’s awesome. It seems like it gives you that opportunity to do cross marketing, and to collaborate with others in the industry. And you’re not doing much. It’s amazing how those little things that are so simple can make such a difference.

Travis: Yeah. And to your point, I’m making new friends all over the world. I’m trying to find people that have a big influence in the country that they’re from, that have work that I think is genuinely stunning, and there’s talent in it. In the sense of cross pollination, it’s networking me with people all over the world, which is great for our brand.

Rebekah: Yeah, exposing it to other countries. That’s awesome. We have to collaborate with each other in the beauty industry. That’s how everybody wins, really.

Travis: Yeah, in all industries. You see any collaboration between this brand and this brand, or this brand and that celebrity, and you’re like, oh, that must be the coolest thing that’s ever happened. Because Nike and so-and-so are doing a project together, and that collaboration is really cool, or Adidas or whatever. And you’re like, oh, that’s the dopest thing. So in essence, it’s us reporting to that concept, through our ways.

Closing

Rebekah: That’s great. Well, congratulations on that.

Travis: Oh my God. That’s really awesome. I would not have put a dollar on that turning into what it has. I would have been like, that’s silly.

Rebekah: But you took the chance and took the risk. I think that’s great. Well, Travis, thank you so much for taking time with me today. This has been so much fun, getting to know you, and it’s inspiring what you talked about. So thank you for taking your time.

Travis: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s been a pleasure to hang out with you. I appreciate sharing my story, and you had incredible questions. So thank you so much.

Rebekah: Thank you, Travis.