2 weeks Ago By Duncan Greive
Originally published by The Spinoff . Three teenage barbers in Mt Albert have capitalised on a viral haircut to build businesses on Instagram. Duncan Greive gets a haircut and a lesson in modern business.
“When I first started cutting hair, I messed up my friend really badly,” says Ali. I shiver involuntarily – he has clippers in his hand and is halfway through giving me a fresh lid. “There was no fade, no nothing.
It was really horrible.” Ali, whose surname we’re withholding at his mum’s request, sounds truly remorseful. “He was really, really angry.
Didn’t talk to me for a few days.” Ali is a 15-year-old barber , one of a trio who have built brisk and growing businesses cutting a very specific haircut atop the heads of hundreds of teenage boys. My daughter Robyn goes to school with him, and told me about this kid she knew who was cutting hair on Instagram one day.
Everything about it sounded awesome. A 15-year-old starting his own business, in charge of everything from payments to equipment to marketing, giving everyone that same “broccoli perm” – so named for its resemblance to the divisive vegetable – that GQ calls “the definitive Zoomer hairstyle”. I tracked him down, cleared it with his mum and went to his studio, out the back of a Sandringham villa, and had Ali tell me his story while he trimmed me a Gen X broccoli perm.
Ali has always been entrepreneurial, according to his mother. It started with selling “random stuff” through Facebook Marketplace , before he moved on to trading cards, sold to friends at school. It wasn’t until he turned 14 that he decided to try cutting hair, after seeing a friend take to it with ease.
He picked a classic hairdresser’s pun to trade under: Ali Barber..
