5 Years of Growth That Evolved Into My Brand, “CH1 Luxury Hair”
December 2017. I took this walking in Chester on Eastgate Street. The world would stop every time
To anyone who is reading this, welcome to my very first blog post. I am covering a topic once and for all that has been requested for many years on the meaning and history behind my brand CH1 (pronounced the letter, “C'“ , “H”, and the number, “1”). When I’m asked in the salon where my brand name came about I always give a brief “oh its the city I use to live in when I lived in the UK so it fit”. I have hesitated on sharing with my followers and clients the TRUE meaning of my beautiful, special, insane, love story with the city I love most, CH1 (Chester, England).
I took this the first morning I woke up in Cancun, Mexico. I made sure to get up right at sunrise.
This brand started evolving before I even knew this city existed.I spent the majority of my early 20’s working as a hairstylist, and when I say working I mean like 50-60 hour weeks, one client after another, every day, non stop. I drove 100 miles to and from work everyday. I was the first one in the salon the morning and the last one to finish .It was always worth it to me though. I had a brand new car, shopped whenever I wanted, my own apartment, and a busting-at-the-seems clientele so I was a baller in my eyes! Deep down, the “materials” I had weren’t making me happy, they were quick fixes. I was overweight, giving all my energy to people who didn’t deserve it and wasnt making ME a priority. The mentioning of all this will make sense in paragraphs to come ;).
2012 happened. I went to Cancun, Mexico and game over. It was my first trip abroad and it opened my eyes to the diversity of the world. I was so fascinated by the distinct communication, fashion styles, the melting pot of different lives that were being lived all over! Beautiful, grown, women in biknis with gorgeous foreign accents and men drinking Mexican beers on the pool and chatting me up as if they had known me my whole life. As a young girl, from a small town in the midwest where my parents wouldn’t even let me drive two hours away from home, I was so fascinated! It was this feeling like I finally figured out what was missing. I needed to get out of that small town, go see and do and experience and break free of this shell I was living in that wasn’t me! I had this sense of freedom that filled me up, that I could be whoever I wanted to be regardless where I was. With that being said, I discovered the world of traveling and the fire it ignited in my soul at the age of 22. From that point on, my focus shifted, I worked really hard, and then I would travel abroad for a couple weeks at a time. This pattern continued for 3 years.
September 2013, Big Ben + Houses of Parliament, London, UK
In the meantime of my travels all over Europe I fell in love and eventually got married. My husband at the time was from the UK so I left my business in Indiana, moved to his city (Oswestry) and we pursued life in England together. At the young age of 25 we ended up parting ways and this was a huge milestone in my life. In the meantime of some life changing events, I was slowly building a business in the UK that was taking off a lot quicker than I imagined! I worked in a salon in a neighboring city called, Chester.
From the moment I stepped foot in this city, I knew it was special. An old roman town, filled with so much history and preserved so beautifully. Gorgeous medieval castle ruins and Victorian buildings fill the whole city center and ancient, roman walls enclosing the entire town making it feel like your stepping into a fairytale back in time. Chester is filled with all different walks of life, small, family owned coffee shops that pull you through their doors just by the smell as you walk past, every store front is glass so you can look and see people enjoying a cocktail and conversation with a loved one sat across, shops buzzing with beautiful men and women and on the weekends the whole on the city buzzing for a weekend out at the clubs later that night or a horse race happening on a Saturday at the local Racecourse. Through the city ran a canal you could walk to neighboring villages. Pubs and expensive cocktail bars backed up to certain parts of the canal, and if you walked just a little bit out of the city you would see stunning homes, full of character with flowers in bloom year round thanks to the moody British weather. The whole feel of the city all day everyday was just one that kept me inspired, I felt so safe and as odd as it sounds, so far away from the people who raised me I felt "at home”.
working at a salon in the closest city to
understanding
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