Edit: I originally wrote this post a year and a half ago. Rereading it now, everything in it still holds. If anything, more so. Sharing it as it was first written, unchanged. (Reid)
You know that saying, "Good things come to those who wait"? I think about that a lot when I think about how I ended up here.
I've spent my career across the beauty industry: cosmetology school, salon work, product education, and eventually building and running a business inside it. Along the way, I worked with plenty of brands and plenty of employers, and I learned just as much from the ones that didn't work out as the ones that did. Some patterns showed up again and again, and over time I started keeping a mental list of red flags:
- Employees or leadership checked out
- Lack of follow through
- Unclear directives
- Poor and cheap packaging, and quality control that didn't match the price point
- Lack of accountability
- Lack of humility or gratitude
- Lack of communication and disjointed training
Every one of those things costs a business more than it realizes, not just in operations, but in trust, and eventually in retention, both of clients and of the people working for you.
When I first started working with the Elleebana USA team, I was watching for those same red flags out of habit. I kept waiting for one to show up. It didn't. What I found instead was a brand with genuinely thorough manuals, real science behind the formulations rather than marketing dressed up as science, a team structure that actually communicated, and a level of ethics I hadn't consistently seen elsewhere in this industry. Small things stood out too, like the decision to replace sodium bromate with hydrogen peroxide in their lift system, and the development of a vegan Re-Gen product, both choices that cost the brand more to make and weren't strictly necessary from a marketing standpoint. Those are the kinds of decisions a company makes when it actually cares about the outcome, not just the sale.
That's what led me to becoming a Certified Elleebana Trainer, and eventually to building Polymorph Beauty around distributing and teaching this system specifically. Good things really do come to those who wait, and to those willing to hold out for a partner that matches the standard they're trying to hold themselves to.