A few months ago I popped along to The Roots Foundation for the next in my local businesses series. Barbering and hairdressing must be one of the strangest industries to be in at the moment, one that requires close contact and has been subject to so many changes over the past few months.
This lovely bunch has been so kind as to put together a blog post on what this year has been like for them, all words below are their own.
Please note: these photos were taken before the Covid19 Government Safety Guidelines for Barbers and Hairdressers were changed. The Roots Foundation strictly follow government safety guidelines and staff wear both masks and visors together, as required.
The week leading up to lockdown was bizarre. It felt like a low budget disaster movie, but in place of The Hero, we only had the haunting vision of a bumbling Boris at the helm. The lack of information left us feeling, like many, completely lost. With no government guidance about close-contact services like ours, we decided to take safety procedures into our own hands. We introduced additional sanitising and cleaning routines, cancelled all beard services, stopped serving drinks and asked our customers to be vigilant with their own health. Our primary concern was our vulnerable clients, but even with our procedures, the uncertainty around Covid-19 made those pre-lockdown days pretty fraught. We wanted to provide a sense of normalcy for as long as possible, but halfway through the day on Saturday 21st March, things just didn’t feel right. We decided to close up with absolutely no idea when we would reopen. Needless to say, we all went a bit pale that day.
At that time, we naively thought: “Let’s give it two weeks and we’ll see what happens.” Hah, fools. Of course, we had no idea the official lockdown was coming just two days later and would last much longer than any of us anticipated.
We are lucky that our diary tends to book up in advance, but with that, we had a lot of people to contact. We personally called our clients for the next two weeks to apologise and to let everyone know about the closure. The shop was like a hectic call centre as we worked through our contact lists, each of us talking over one another. As always, our clients were very understanding. Their kindness and encouragement helped us enormously.
When lockdown came, we were relieved that we’d made the right decision to close. After an initial adjustment period of failed Joe Wicks workouts, supermarket avoidance, and for PJ, an inexplicable increase in quinoa-based meals, it wasn’t long before we started to work towards the future. As we rode the emotional rollercoaster of it all, we actually managed to tick off various projects that had been waiting in the wings: shop renovations, building new furniture, painting, setting up an online booking system, as well as a mountain of riveting (!) admin work. But with every day that passed, there was always a niggling feeling in our stomachs. We had so many questions: what will the future of barbering look like? Will we ever get back to “normal”? Will anyone want to come back to have their hair cut? Will we ever be a social space again? What will our new running costs be?
Of course, in the middle of all this came the surge in the Black Lives Matter movement. It was a pivotal time for reflection and learning. Some of our team were lucky enough to attend the gatherings and protests in Exeter, all of which were extremely moving and insightful. We were grateful to be able to hear people’s stories, to take stock and to plan the actions we would take as a team, then, now, and for the future.
The government announced that our industry could reopen on 4th July, with safety measures in place. However, once again we were at the mercy of Boris and his piss poor communication. We waited for what seemed like an eternity for official guidelines to be released and even when they appeared, we found them confusing. We’re a sensitive bunch, each sitting somewhere slightly different on the Worry Spectrum! But that’s what makes us work well together and helped us to get our reopening action plan sorted: PPE, staggered appointments to reduce the number of people in the shop, longer time slots to allow for strict cleaning regimes, Roots-specific staff and client guidelines, and a new staff rota which reduced our team to only two barbers working at a time.
As lockdown has eased, the safety rules for our industry have actually become tighter. And although we’ve been operating at a reduced capacity, we would rather proceed carefully and with thought for those at risk. Like many businesses in the Covid era, things haven’t been easy. Our days are much more tiring as we need more time and energy for each appointment. Communicating while decked out in PPE is tricky, and don’t underestimate the horrors of smelling your own breath under your mask and visor all day. But we’re thankful for it all. We’re getting used to our new rhythm and being able to connect with our clients again has meant so much. We’re even about to welcome a new member to the team – the awesome, Liv Plum! This is huge news for us and has really helped with our sense of progress after such a pause in momentum.
We are so grateful that we’re still here. We still have our shop, our jobs, and a way of working in this new world. We appreciate that many others aren’t so lucky and our hearts go out to them. Huge thanks to our customers, friends and our local independent business community for all their support this year. We wouldn’t be here without them.
Take care and keep pushing forwards x