Why You Need To Visit The Redken Exchange This Year
We chatted with Yidah Pellerito, AVP of The Redken Exchange, to get the scoop on this year’s amazing educational offerings.
“What we are is an advanced training facility for hairdressers — kind of like hairdresser university,” says Pellerito, "So whether you’re a hairdresser who has just graduated from beauty school and has a professional license, or a hairdresser that has worked behind the chair for 20 years, we cater to all the different levels of experience.”
This year's class schedule features fifty different artists who have come from all over the world to teach at The Redken Exchange. Each course has around 30 spaces, and can teach you skill sets ranging from how to perfect a certain haircolor technique to how to open a salon to how to develop your own personal brand as a hairdresser.
Pellerito ensures that the courses cover topics hairdressers are interested in learning about, and incorporates crowdsourcing to build each year’s curriculum. “Every year, we host focus groups to help determine the class schedule. We take a look at this feedback and say, "Okay, so what's the need? What is it that stylists are looking for? What do stylists want to learn?,” she explains.
Some of the most exciting programs to be offered at The Redken Exchange this year will include:
Client Liaison: This three day program, which was heavily requested, will teach stylists anything and everything they need to know about building a salon from scratch. On the first day, stylists will be coached on how to open a salon. Day two will focus on creating a culture in the salon to ensure all salon staff work together towards a goal, “Day 2 is about creating a culture in your salon where everybody's on the same page, and everybody's willing to participate,” says Pellerito. “We’ll show stylists how to set up a salon culture, which is super, super important.” The last day of the program, called “Step Up” is facilitated by Linda Macchi, a top Redken Business Artist. Macchi will work with stylists to teach them how to create their own personal brand, which is especially important when a stylist works in someone else’s salon. "What Linda does is create that sense of responsibility within each stylist, teaching them to ask themselves, ‘I am my own brand, so how am I going to present myself? How am I going to run my own business?’
Now Trending: This set of classes — one for haircutting, and one for haircolor — will focus on how to adapt and recreate current hair trends in your own chair. “For example, a trend may come along and all of a sudden clients are requesting that look” says Pellerito. "So as a stylist you need to take those trends that are happening right now, and recreate them. We teach people how to do that in this class.”
Color & Know Why, Cut & Know Why and Finish & Know Why: The Redken Exchange’s core curriculum which are offered every year (and always sell out!), teach stylists the fundamental skills they need to perfect in order to succeed behind the chair.
The courses, though, are only one piece when it comes to learning and networking at The Redken Exchange. “Hairdressers come from everywhere — from New York City, to South Africa, to Wyoming — It's a very diversified group of people that come here to learn,” says Pellerito. "So while some of them might be on top of the trends and what's happening, others are sponges trying to soak it in and learn how they can they can translate these trends and bring them back to their salon. As a result, stylists that come to The Redken Exchange have a great pool of people that they can network with, and share their experiences with. And they also get to network with the world class facilitators that are teaching here!”
Redken Artist Jillian Bono first visited The Redken Exchange when she was 17 — before she had ever been behind the chair — and credits the facility for helping to shape her as a stylist. "I think every class I've ever taken provided me with something that I could use as a teacher and as a stylist,” she says, noting that she now has a number of mentors in her life who she connected with at the Redken Exchange. “I would say that The Redken Exchange has helped me thrive as a hairdresser and reach my full potential.” This year, Bono will serve as a mentee for the “Color & Know Why” course, something she says her 17-year-old self “wouldn’t believe.”
If you’re a new stylist, visiting The Redken Exchange can be an amazing way to hone your skills in a more refined way. But what if you’ve been in the industry for decades? “When you've been working behind the chair for 20 years, you can sometimes get into a rut, doing the same thing over and over again, and you lose your creativity,” says Pellerito. “So that's what we're here to do, we fuel creativity.”
“We say that what we do here is change people's lives,” she continues. “Which we really do believe that we do. We give stylists the confidence to go out there and experiment with hair — and it’s the learning environment of The Redken Exchange that allows us to build that confidence.”
To learn more about The Redken Exchange’s 2018 class offerings and register, click here!
