{"id":8452,"date":"2026-04-25T09:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T16:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/?p=8452"},"modified":"2026-07-30T15:11:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T22:11:10","slug":"kia-donovan-on-hair-care-and-doing-better-behind-the-chair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/kia-donovan-on-hair-care-and-doing-better-behind-the-chair\/","title":{"rendered":"Kia Donovan on Hair, Care, and Doing Better Behind the Chair"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/4087-large-1.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/4087-large-1-1024x684.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-8455\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><br><strong>When Kia Donovan Talks, the Industry Has to Listen<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sitting down with Kia Donovan felt less like a formal interview and more like one of those conversations that keeps opening new doors every few minutes. We started with Bay Area stories, food talk, and a little swearing permission check, and somehow within minutes we were deep in the real stuff: what it means to build a salon experience where people actually feel seen. That was the heartbeat of our conversation. Not trends. Not performative inclusivity. Actual care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Why Clients Still Feel Like There\u2019s No Place for Them in Beauty\" width=\"563\" height=\"1000\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/N0-UZrsiJ5Y?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia, who many know as The Curl Consultant, has built her career around natural pattern education, but the way she talks about hair goes beyond technique. For her, the work starts with helping guests understand their hair as it naturally grows, without forcing it into somebody else\u2019s standard. What struck me most was how clearly she has held onto that vision, even when the industry told her there was \u201cno space\u201d for it. She shared a story from beauty school that was equal parts brutal and clarifying: when she said she wanted to become the go-to person for people learning to work with their natural pattern, she was basically told that dream had no future. Kia\u2019s response was not to shrink. It was to look around, look at the real world, and think: that just cannot be true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That refusal to accept the industry\u2019s lazy defaults runs through everything she does. We talked about how many clients walk into salons already bracing themselves to feel out of place, unheard, or badly served. Kia put words to something a lot of stylists know but do not always say out loud: plenty of spaces still signal, very clearly, who they are for and who they are not for. What made this conversation so compelling is that Kia never talks about inclusion as a vague idea. She talks about it in concrete, behind-the-chair terms. What products are on your shelf? What tools do you actually have? What does your intake process communicate before the guest even sits down? Those details tell the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She also shared one of the most memorable parts of her own journey: leaving a prestigious salon after realizing its values did not match the work she wanted to do. That decision could have flattened her. Instead, it pushed her toward building something better. She moved into freelance work, found a mentor whose approach truly resonated, and slowly built a business centered on skill, dignity, and one-to-one care. There is no fake martyr energy in the way Kia talks about independence, either. She is honest about the work. She is still the one doing the website, the cleanup, the systems, the prep. But she is equally clear that guests deserve an experience built with intention, not hierarchy for hierarchy\u2019s sake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of my favorite turns in the conversation was hearing how seriously she treats the guest experience. Kia described prepping for clients by reviewing records, researching products they use, and setting the room before they arrive, to the point that guests are shocked she is actually ready for them. That landed hard. For a lot of us, that level of care should be normal. In reality, it is still rare enough to surprise people. And that says a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We also got into education, product overload, fragrance sensitivity, industry exploitation, and the strange ways social media has both helped and confused the conversation around hair. Kia has the rare ability to talk about big systemic issues while staying grounded in real salon life. She is thoughtful, funny, blunt when it counts, and deeply committed to making both stylists and clients more informed. The result is not just a better haircut. It is a better standard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By the end of our chat, I mostly felt grateful. Grateful that voices like Kia\u2019s exist in this industry. Grateful that she is building education around the things too many people still treat as optional. And grateful that this conversation kept reminding me what the best salon professionals already know: technique matters, but how people feel in your space matters just as much. <br><br>Watch the full interview if you want the deeper version, because there is a lot more in there, and every minute earns its place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Textured Hair Education: Why Clients Still Feel Unseen in Salons\" width=\"1200\" height=\"675\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bac8uPPcsPE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><br><strong>You can find Kia at:<br><\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/kiathecurlconsultant\/?hl=en\">https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/kiathecurlconsultant\/?hl=en<\/a> <br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCoMhwWcS6u8qkCZ2VbIfGGQ \">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCoMhwWcS6u8qkCZ2VbIfGGQ <\/a><br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thecurlconsultant.com\/stylisteducation\">https:\/\/www.thecurlconsultant.com\/stylisteducation<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Transcript: <\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (00:00)<br>that about that person? yes, you can cuss as much as you want. am pro-cussing on a regular basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (00:01)<br>Am I allowed to cuss?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When peppered in, you know, in the right way, I think it can be useful for emphasis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (00:12)<br>Absolutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right. \u2053 Okay, fantastic. I am here with Kia Donovan. And I just want to say thank you so much for joining me today. Would you just give us a little, you know, however long you want just a little bit of something about yourself and where you&#8217;re from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (00:31)<br>Sure, my name is Kia Donovan. I go by the curl consultant online in some spaces. I am a natural pattern focused educator, salon owner and technologist. And I&#8217;m based in the California Bay area right now in San Jose, California, but proudly born in San Francisco and lived in Oakland. So, know, Bay to the A. \u2053 right on. Very cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (00:49)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">love it. It&#8217;s where my where my dad was from San Francisco. Yep. Lived there till<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">he was 10 and then \u2053 got moved to San Rafael from that point on. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (01:05)<br>Yeah, I love<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">it. There&#8217;s some good restaurants in San Francisco. Most things for me are prompted by like, where can I eat? And you&#8217;re in Vancouver, which is a town with absolutely fantastic food and wonderful people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (01:14)<br>\u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I agree, I love all of it. You are in one of my favorite places in the world. My heart will always be attached to the Bay Area. In fact, my first trip to a hair show was to an ice show in San Jose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (01:31)<br>you&#8217;re<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">kidding me. yeah, the San Jose Convention Center. That used to be a really big one. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (01:33)<br>But it was, yeah, and it was<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">just after the like 2000 tech bubble burst and after September 11th. So I went and I had a lonely planet guide for San Jose and every restaurant had gone out of business. Like everything in it was gone. It was a ghost town. I have a feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com?utm_source=salonmonster-blog&amp;utm_medium=social-organic&amp;utm_campaign=right-sidebar-14daysfree\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-1024x576.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-8570\" srcset=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-1024x576.png 1024w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-768x432.png 768w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-1536x864.png 1536w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-2048x1152.png 2048w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-400x225.png 400w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-800x450.png 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (01:42)<br>yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2053 yeah, of course it had. Yes, yes. Yeah, San Jose,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">you know, I mean, like a lot of places, it&#8217;s very tied to the local commerce that is also very bloom and bust, right? So being a business owner in an area like that always makes for additional festivities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (02:03)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. Okay, so you tell me about natural pattern, natural pattern styling, tell me about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (02:16)<br>Yeah,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">my aim in working with guests is to help them better understand their pattern and hair as it grows out of their head without tons of additional manipulation or modification. \u2053 My goal is to help them reach a place where they not only understand what&#8217;s happening with their hair and scalp, but also can hopefully appreciate it and reach a space where they find that aesthetically, it complements who they are inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right. And so I think there are a lot of different paths that my work takes to get folks to that place or in an attempt to help us all be a little bit more connected to that. But that&#8217;s really the core of the work that I do. And of course, that always involves an examination of \u2053 history and how we&#8217;ve arrived at where we are in our industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (02:47)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm. And okay, so were you aware of\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like in my schooling, I did an apprenticeship. I don&#8217;t remember anybody ever discussing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">natural, just natural growth direction in a meaningful way, other than like, other than talking to me about hair and fringes, no one, and then about 10 years into my industry, I think I just discovered that hair grows out of the head in a certain direction and different everywhere. What was that something from the beginning of your career? Or did it take a while? Did someone teach you about that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (03:41)<br>That&#8217;s something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think that for, in my particular experience, my educational \u2053 path and the formal side was not comprehensive in a way that I saw either myself represented or frankly the population that I intended to work with. So I knew going into school, hey, this is an underserved group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of which I happen to be a part of, I would love to be a subject matter expert in this. I would love to do this work. And it was really surprising, I think, maybe a bit of naivety on my part to get to beauty school and think like, oh, cool, now I&#8217;m going to learn about the scope of human hair. Oh, not so much. I, you know, on the first day, I sometimes will tell the anecdote that on the first day, I, you know, we all were asked what we wanted to do with this profession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I said I wanted to be the point person for individuals looking to understand their hair as it grows out of their head. And my professor said, if you do that, you will fold in a year. There is no space for that in this industry. Nobody&#8217;s interested in that. And \u2053 ironically, this is an individual who in its natural state had hair that looked very much like mine. Right. And so I was also entering school after having experienced multiple other careers. So I think that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (04:41)<br>Hmm?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (05:10)<br>in a way I had a bit of perspective that allowed me to kind of step back, even though it was really painful and really a challenging experience, but to say like, okay, while I appreciate that this is the curriculum, this is not reflective of the world. And I have to kind of brazenly almost charge forth and know like, to dog you wrong though, that&#8217;s just not the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (05:35)<br>Yes!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (05:36)<br>I remember coming<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (05:37)<br>No!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (05:37)<br>home and saying to my family, like, when was the last time this woman went to a grocery store? Like, what world does she live in where she thinks that there are not other individuals who are looking to wear their hair in a way that feels comfortable to them without, you know, having to do acrobatics or spending \u2053 exorbitant amounts of money or time. I can&#8217;t be alone in this desire. I can&#8217;t be anomalous in this want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (06:02)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (06:03)<br>And so that was really the underpinning of my education, but it was very sort of singularly minded, very antiquated education. Not to say that there weren&#8217;t educators on staff who were trying their best, but they were very much bound by the rules and regulations and curriculum that they had to work with at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (06:17)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, that just seems like\u2026 Well, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (06:22)<br>And then there were other ones that were just salty, you know, which I think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">is part of like the beauty school experience, \u2053 which also for me, I think allowed me to identify in a way things that I wanted to carry on with me into my career. And also things that I wanted to make sure none of my guests ever experienced under my watch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (06:44)<br>No, it&#8217;s the\u2026 I remember sitting\u2026 I did an apprenticeship. So I went to beauty school for a hot minute, but it was just \u2053 for six weeks to brush up on stuff so I could pass the exam that had nothing in it, anyone would do in a salon, but I needed to be able to do it. And I remember sitting at the front desk and I was very lucky. One of the people I was apprenticing under was really big on making sure\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (06:50)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (07:13)<br>the minute folks walked into the salon that they were that eye contact was given and they were greeted with a smile. They were invited in. I didn&#8217;t understand that \u2053 people think different types of salons and barbershops and everywhere that there people think that they&#8217;re cool places and they don&#8217;t feel like they&#8217;re a part of it. They don&#8217;t feel and they can be a spot where people just sort of sit around and talk to each other and they don&#8217;t greet people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (07:39)<br>Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (07:39)<br>And<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I got firsthand, I got the firsthand view at the front desk of seeing people walk in and feeling like they weren&#8217;t supposed to be there in lots of different ways. And I remember how awful it looked like it felt and wanting to never have anybody feel that way. Have you ever been to an Izakaya restaurant?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (07:46)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I love an izakaya. We actually have a delicious izakaya that I happen to eat plant-based and it&#8217;s an incredible plant-based izakaya. So like, another level. Listen, food, listen. I&#8217;ll probably talk about food like a solid half dozen additional times in this. Yeah, but it is that, you know, if I think about an izakaya, it is that \u2053 experiential design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (08:08)<br>\u2053 well that&#8217;s exciting. That&#8217;s an option?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;ll be right there, let&#8217;s go!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (08:26)<br>that becomes such a critical component, right? It is that from the moment, and hopefully prior to arriving at the establishment, you already started to have a curated experience of what that is going to feel like, who you are going to be within that space, how you&#8217;re going to be recognized. There are so many ways to signal those things that are overt, covert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (08:26)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (08:52)<br>Right? So I actually, love, I love thinking about that. That&#8217;s such a cool way to, to like tie it in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (08:58)<br>Yeah, and I loved that. I remember the first time I walked in one and everyone turns and greets you. Okay, it was maybe I don&#8217;t want to say it was off-putting. I had never had that many people yell at me at once when I walked in a door. So I and no one told me but no matter how that made me feel, even if I was startled, there was no way I felt like I wasn&#8217;t supposed to be there. \u2053 And I remember thinking that I want everyone to feel that way the minute they walk into a salon and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (09:04)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Okay, it&#8217;s new, it&#8217;s new, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Absolutely. Absolutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (09:27)<br>That&#8217;s just not my experience in the first few years, other than a couple of individuals. \u2053 I remember\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (09:32)<br>Yeah, it certainly wasn&#8217;t<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">my experience being a consumer. I don&#8217;t know about you, I, yeah, I never to this day, even having been a hairdresser for 12 years, I&#8217;ve never received a haircut experience myself where I was seen in any way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (09:36)<br>No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, I mean, you know, I may have had vaguely similar experiences. It turns out I might look remarkably like the target audience for literally everything ever prior to a certain point in time. And it actually took my mom when I was like 18 or 19, she came and stayed with me and we went into some clothing store. It doesn&#8217;t matter what it was, but we went in and then after we left, she said that was<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That was so amazing how when you walked in the door, everybody turned and greeted you and made you feel welcome. And I said, well, I&#8217;m in the service industry, so I know how to bring that out in people, except you can&#8217;t as you walk in the door. And she said, no, you have to understand. I&#8217;m don&#8217;t know what she would have been like, maybe 50. She&#8217;s like, I&#8217;m a 50 year old female. I&#8217;m invisible. When I walk in the door of places, I&#8217;m invisible. At best, I&#8217;m a person. Someone goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2053 Okay, next. And at worst, you&#8217;re not seen in the first place. And I couldn&#8217;t take it in the minute she told me. But within the next year, I started to look for it. I started to like pay attention to it. And that was when I realized, it&#8217;s everywhere. It&#8217;s everywhere all the time. And it&#8217;s everyone that doesn&#8217;t look like me, basically, everyone that doesn&#8217;t. So \u2053 gender, race, ethnicity, everyone and and yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (10:57)<br>Shwerb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes, yes, so insidious. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (11:15)<br>I thank her on a regular basis for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (11:16)<br>I think a lot of, yeah,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I mean, a lot of the guests that I work with, \u2053 regardless of their expression or how they identify themselves, one through line for a lot of them is, I went to the salon, I did not feel comfortable there. Or I went to the place that was identified as the best caliber or the best haircut or the most exclusive. \u2053 And this isn&#8217;t just salons, this is barber shops. This is\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don&#8217;t feel particularly effeminate. I don&#8217;t feel particularly masculine or they couldn&#8217;t cut my hair at the shop that says they specialize in ex-ethnicity, but they also could not cut my hair at this salon and I am a hybrid of those. So where do I go? Right. And you have to at a certain point step back, I think as a business person and recognize that like so many of these businesses are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">effectively by choice, just leaving people \u2053 without services because they don&#8217;t see the value proposition in it, which is ironic because when we actually run the numbers, like the demographic that I oftentimes work with in many cases is spending the bulk of their disposable income on hair, beauty and other aesthetic measures, right? So it&#8217;s just like, huh? wait, so if you like money, you would want me to be at your salon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (12:22)<br>That&#8217;s the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, your excuse is that it&#8217;s not money, but I know people that get on a plane and fly across a country to find a person that can take care of them. So to tell me that money is the reason, it could only be if you don&#8217;t like it, I guess. You must not like it. I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (12:46)<br>That&#8217;s right. That&#8217;s right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. Yes. Yes. I mean, I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">remember having a conversation around the sort of time that we were talking about a little bit earlier, that 2020 influx of faux interest in more equitable styling practices. I remember having a conversation with an executive at a beauty supplier, one of the two largest in the country, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (13:02)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (13:21)<br>they had asked me to do some work for them. And as a part of that conversation, I asked them, okay, well, if we know, for example, black female identified customers are spending at this rate, help me understand why you&#8217;ll carry these products, but will not put them in your brick and mortar stores. It would be advantageous for you to do that. Right. And I kind of jokingly said, it&#8217;s, almost feels like you don&#8217;t want us in the stores. he went, oh yeah, no, that&#8217;s exactly it. We just don&#8217;t want you physically here. So that&#8217;s why we put that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">all online and I kind of had to sit with it and go like, \u2053 we&#8217;re not even, we&#8217;re not even going to dance around the reality here. It&#8217;s we want the income, but we do not want the physical presence of people who look like you within the walls of our establishment. Right. And this is in the same conversation where they&#8217;re asking me, Hey, we want you to create curriculum for our in-store salons so that they can better serve folks. Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (13:57)<br>Wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wow, that&#8217;s a\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (14:20)<br>And my retort was, I would love to do that. We need to examine the products that you carry because if your stylists are bound by using products in your, you know, your purview, they&#8217;re not going to be able to offer the best job because currently you don&#8217;t carry products that will allow them to do their work, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (14:26)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">so they just wanted people to buy it online but they don&#8217;t want them there that&#8217;s an amazing amount of confidence in their own prejudice that that&#8217;s a spectacular not that that&#8217;s unusual or unheard of in any way shape or form but<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (14:42)<br>Go!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right, I mean, because the reality<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">is like people still clamor for these few positions that are adjacent to these companies, right? People are still constantly like, \u2053 let me get the blessing of X company or I&#8217;m an X incubator or I am affiliated with this group that shows what, right? So.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (15:15)<br>So,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I mean, that&#8217;s not even, I mean, I&#8217;m not a particularly huge fan of capitalism, but that&#8217;s not even a good capitalist. Do you know what I mean? Like, that&#8217;s not even, you&#8217;re not even doing a good job of being a person ripping people off. what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (15:24)<br>That was always my thing, right? No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">could understand<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">it if it was purely monetary, right? So it was like, no, we&#8217;re just the cash grab and we&#8217;re gonna lean into, you know, this type of marketing or surfacing these type of models because we know they sell, but it&#8217;s just so blatant, right? When these companies bring in, you know, black at whatever brands and then you can only find them in stores that they have identified as black markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (15:34)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (16:00)<br>right? Which is always a hoot to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (16:02)<br>Wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I mean, I don&#8217;t know why I&#8217;m acting like I&#8217;m surprised. I&#8217;m surprised and in no way surprised simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (16:09)<br>Right. Yeah,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I mean, I think in a way for me, being acutely aware of a lot of these nuances of our industry and being privy to some of these conversations or being in these rooms early allowed me to kind of dispel some of the like magic that I had created about these things in my own brain. And remember that these are just institutions run by humans and humans are fallible and they&#8217;re good people and bad people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (16:36)<br>And then<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">some, yep, uh-huh, yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (16:37)<br>Right? And<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">that for me personally, I actually much more value the ability to remain truly agnostic in terms of what I choose to use with my guests than having \u2053 the support of things that I don&#8217;t necessarily align with in totality or in a way that feels good for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (16:50)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s, yeah. It&#8217;s a hard thing to do. And you know, I know a lot of people when they get into the industry, they struggle with just the retail side of things in general. They have a hard time selling to people at all. \u2053 And I have a hard time selling things I don&#8217;t think people need or I don&#8217;t really like. It&#8217;s one of the reasons I&#8217;m independent. I don&#8217;t have a hard time selling things \u2053 I love and believe in and do something that I meant. And \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (17:08)<br>\u2053 gosh. Sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (17:29)<br>And just as importantly for me are values backed companies that have a belief system, whatever it might be, whether it&#8217;s about where their ingredients come from or their hiring practices, whatever, that&#8217;s as important as what it can do for me. \u2053 And you can find it, although I do find it tends to have to be smaller independent companies more often than not. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (17:45)<br>Absolutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right. And that means that you&#8217;re paying a tax for working<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">ethically, right? Or with values driven kind of purpose in mind. I remember having conversations with reps when I first got into the industry and they&#8217;re like, well, you you need to be making X percentage of retail or people that teach these courses that have these very concrete ideas about what numbers you should be moving. And I remember very, you know,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (18:13)<br>Hm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (18:21)<br>non-confrontationally saying like, I can&#8217;t buy any of the brands at the supply store. So I actually have to pay full price for everything. So there&#8217;s not actually a platform where I could even retail the products that my guests are using. So I just provide them with that information as a supportive service at the time, because there really wasn&#8217;t a mechanism in place for me to do that. And you just get blank stares. It&#8217;s like, well, why are you being so hard to work with? And it&#8217;s like,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (18:51)<br>God, are you sure?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (18:51)<br>Am I being hard to work with or do you guys just not<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">carry anything that works on 65 % of the global population and then you&#8217;re blaming it on us? It feels like a little bit like that, but this is the touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (19:00)<br>Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s so, yeah. mean, yeah, I don&#8217;t, yeah, it&#8217;s bizarre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (19:08)<br>Yeah, I mean, but being<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">independent has for me been truly life saving, right? Because, you know, unfortunately I was not in a position where I could access any type of on the job training or apprenticeships that actually were not, were informed little and not harmful, right? They were actually harmful to me and to the\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (19:14)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (19:37)<br>customers that I was trying to draw to my salon, right? And so I had to kind of very early say like, gosh, I guess I&#8217;m gonna have to do this alone almost from inception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (19:46)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (19:52)<br>Which again,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">know that there&#8217;s, know, amongst our industry, there are tons of different critiques about, you know, folks leaving school and immediately entering into the workforce and the positives and negatives around that. But I will say that for someone like myself, if I had been forced to stay in a multi-chair salon, I would not have continued in this career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (20:17)<br>No, nor I mean, I Yeah, I mean, I lucked out a couple of times. The first place I was at was a bit bananas. I got an amazing education because I was surrounded by a lot of people. but I completely hear what you&#8217;re saying. I did have a conversation with someone very recently that was from that sort of \u2053 mindset that too many people go independent too soon. And I and I know what they mean. Like, I understand. Look, of course, the benefit of community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (20:39)<br>Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (20:45)<br>is fantastic. Like, of course, if you could be surrounded by \u2053 an array of \u2053 different types of technically proficient people so you could learn through osmosis, that&#8217;s outstanding. \u2053 But it&#8217;s just not practically only a few people are going to luck out with a place that fits the bill for them. \u2053 And I know I had to become certainly self employed and rent a chair early.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (20:47)<br>Yes. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Incredible. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (21:12)<br>\u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was a long time before I had my own actual space, \u2053 but I just struggled with\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (21:17)<br>Sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (21:23)<br>the values or lack of values across the board. So how quickly did you go independent? So like you went to hair school for how long?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (21:28)<br>Yeah. Yeah. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">hair spool, when I went in California was a 1600 hour program. went full time, which ended up being about 13 months from start to finish. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (21:37)<br>Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Okay. Okay. And then<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">you ended up in, I&#8217;m assuming a multi-chair salon to begin with, as we&#8217;re talking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (21:47)<br>I did. Yeah,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was very heavily recruited to join what at the time was sort of the cream of the crop. Very exclusive, very expensive, very in many ways exclusionary type of salon, but it had a structured apprenticeship program and was very prestigious. And so I took it thinking like, oh, wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com?utm_source=salonmonster-blog&amp;utm_medium=social-organic&amp;utm_campaign=right-sidebar-14daysfree\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-1024x576.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-8593\" srcset=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-1024x576.png 1024w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-768x432.png 768w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-400x225.png 400w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-800x450.png 800w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2.png 1280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (22:07)<br>Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hard to say no. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (22:16)<br>This is it, this is the platform. And even if it&#8217;s not the perfect fit, it will be able to expose me to learning and that&#8217;s great. \u2053 I was there for about two months and \u2053 it was so disheartening every day to\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (22:32)<br>Wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (22:41)<br>not to capitalism it again, but to see \u2053 such a \u2053 profoundly exploitative structure in place where in this case it was primarily \u2053 non-white and queer individuals assisting primarily affluent Caucasian young women. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (22:44)<br>capitalism at as many times as you like. am a-okay with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (23:10)<br>who were just oftentimes gravely uninformed as to how to do any hair that wasn&#8217;t a very small set of the population and were very comfortable mocking anybody who did not fit into that. And as somebody who was at the time 30, I was like, oh, yo, I remember this from like 1994 when I was in high school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (23:37)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (23:37)<br>\u2053 I was over it then and I&#8217;m very much over it now because I&#8217;m a working adult. So if this is, if this is what this industry is, then I actually have no interest in that component. I love the craft. I love what I can do for my guests, but I don&#8217;t need to be a part of the, that dynamic. Right. And so I went home and I made a really hard decision and I wrote a handwritten letter to every, I think 17 people that worked in that salon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (23:41)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (24:07)<br>And I had asked my manager who funnily enough is a very famous platform person now who ran the salon at the time. I said, you brought me in because you said you love that I wanted to focus on pattern and building that out for you. \u2053 Is there an opportunity for me to do that work here? And she said, Kia, there&#8217;s nobody that wants that that walks through these doors. And I remember phrasing it and saying,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (24:07)<br>Wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (24:35)<br>Well, we&#8217;re a color salon. We specialize in color. Are we asking our guests when they leave, would they like to leave with a blowout or would they like to leave with their hair set in its curly state? And she said, well, no one would want it in their curly state. And I just remember in that conversation with her thinking like, I&#8217;ve got to leave. I&#8217;m not quite sure what I&#8217;m going to do, but I can&#8217;t, this is not serving me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">and is souring me, frankly, on the experience. And so I went home, I wrote those notes, I went back the next day, I left the notes, I gave my resignation, and two of those people have continued to reach out of the 17. And that&#8217;s great. And I think that&#8217;s a good example of that&#8217;s just kind of how this whole thing shapes up. For me, yeah, I worked in a salon for<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (25:17)<br>Well, that&#8217;s, I mean, it&#8217;s better than none, but.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (25:29)<br>maybe six weeks. And then I jumped immediately into freelance work. So I was doing weddings, special events, commercial work, and spent my off time trying to identify individuals in my area that had things about their business that I did feel were aspirational or resonated. And I was really lucky. That&#8217;s how I discovered my first mentor, \u2053 Domenica Lewis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (25:31)<br>Wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (25:57)<br>who at the time had a single chair salon and was proficient across all texture, all pattern, all length, all density. And was just working in a really humbly, beautiful way that her guests loved her. And I just said, hey, can I take you out for coffee? And we joked that that was like the seven hour coffee date. And she said, hey, I&#8217;m only here four days a week. Would you like to rent incrementally on the days that I&#8217;m not here and start building out your clientele? So that&#8217;s what I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (26:07)<br>That&#8217;s impressive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (26:27)<br>And at the beginning, really was, \u2053 you know, let me try and pack a day. And that&#8217;s a victory if I can have a day of clients, right? And then over the course of time, I was able to scale up. so we shared a sola for seven years. And then \u2053 I branched out on my own. She moved out of the area. I opened my own suite and again in a sola and did that as a sola single chair for three years. And then<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (26:34)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (26:56)<br>have been in my current space, which is also just me for just over three years. So yeah, that&#8217;s the journey. I, you know, at first I will admit there have been times where I used to be quite self-conscious about the fact that I did not go through a program. I was not put through the ringer in the way that so many stylists talk about almost like you have to put in your work. You have to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (27:01)<br>Amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (27:21)<br>clean the hair traps, you have to scrub the toilet to really be able to understand the work. And I&#8217;m like, no, I&#8217;m 12 years in, I&#8217;m still the only one doing the toilet, I&#8217;m still the only one doing the website. \u2053 I put that work in every day and that&#8217;s what&#8217;s necessary to offer my guests the caliber of experience that I think they frankly deserve. But I never, I just never resonated with that whole like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (27:32)<br>Yeah, I put that work in every day all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, I&#8217;ve been doing hair for\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (27:48)<br>you&#8217;re going to do 30 hair washes and clean hair traps for a year and a half and be grateful for it while you make a minimum wage. \u2053 That&#8217;s not economically feasible for most humans, let alone do I think it&#8217;s like a good way to move through the world. I don&#8217;t think that our career should involve. I think that we can be compensated fairly well. Our guests can also receive services that feel like they&#8217;re accurately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (27:56)<br>No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (28:17)<br>priced for what they&#8217;re receiving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (28:17)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You don&#8217;t have to. It&#8217;s not a requirement to build systematic abuse into your training program. Like, it&#8217;s not, \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (28:23)<br>It shouldn&#8217;t be, but it really<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">does feel sometimes like that is how we are conditioned to enter. Yes. Yes. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (28:34)<br>It&#8217;s that trauma that goes along with abuse, right? It&#8217;s that like, if you were abused, it&#8217;s gonna be<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">mighty hard for you to not pass that on to the next person, right? Like it&#8217;s just, doesn&#8217;t have to be hair in anything. If this is how it happened to you, even if you didn&#8217;t like it at the time, you&#8217;re gonna have a hard time not doing the same thing. I had a friend who was doing an apprenticeship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (28:44)<br>Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Absolutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (28:59)<br>And she was talking about, I think it was 1030 at night. She&#8217;s holding the bowl of bleach for a color tech and she yawned and he painted bleach on her tongue. And he said, that&#8217;ll teach you to yawn when you&#8217;re assisting me. And she was, you know, 18, 19 and just took it, you know, and.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (29:10)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right. Sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, I mean,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">it&#8217;s truly sadistic and it&#8217;s like, I worked in finance, right? So I&#8217;ve seen sadistic individuals \u2053 on a large scale. And \u2053 so I think I was in a way able to recognize some flags \u2053 quickly just given my life experience. And, you know, I also recognize that the careers that I had<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (29:24)<br>Okay, yes, on a large scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (29:48)<br>prior to this work have so deeply informed the work that I do here. And I&#8217;m always, I think as an educator, trying to emphasize to anybody that I teach that having supportive systems and boundaries and processes that make sense for you and your clients are actually the most critical underpinning of the work that we do because you can be an incredible creative, but if people can&#8217;t book you or they can&#8217;t<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">pay you or you can&#8217;t pay the government, \u2053 you will be stifled, right? And then some, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (30:23)<br>\u2053 I mean, the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">where I did my apprenticeship there was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">one of the best things that came out of it is there was one person, Anthony Crossfield, incredible hairstylist, and he was a natural mentor and had been, he&#8217;d been doing hair since he was about 12. His mom was taking appointments with schoolmates for him. \u2053 And he, as opposed to the sort of Sassoon style training I was doing where it was like, go find somebody that wants a one length bob, \u2053 he\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (30:43)<br>of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (30:58)<br>said just go bring somebody in and let&#8217;s find out what they want to be and how they want to look and i&#8217;ll teach you how to do that but so much of it was about how to make someone feel don&#8217;t turn them away from the the the mirror if you can give a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (31:04)<br>Right. Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">yes. One of my cardinal<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">sins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (31:17)<br>Right? Yes. And look, I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">understand, like, I understand if you&#8217;re dealing with fades with clippers using the mirror, using that mirror so you can see lines. Absolutely. But other than that, I don&#8217;t do it. I sit in front of people when I do \u2053 consultations. He said, if you give a great scalp massage at the sink, most people stop after a while bothering putting time and you can steal everybody&#8217;s client here. But he was all about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (31:24)<br>Sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (31:46)<br>guest experience and making people feel seen and heard. that was one of the like, even though that the experience in general, there was less than ideal, some of the time, which just tended to be the case at most places. I you know, I I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (31:48)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">but you were still<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">able to cherry pick out things that were incredibly useful to you that you could carry on with you throughout your career, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (32:07)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I wouldn&#8217;t<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">tell someone the stuff that I experienced that was negative while, well, did I learn from it? Sure. Is it character building? I guess, but I don&#8217;t suggest it as the methodology for the education process. Like, avoid it if you can. That&#8217;s not \u2053 how humans learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (32:27)<br>No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, and I mean, I think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">it&#8217;s not. And we have to be a lot more empathetic and flexible as educators in terms of, yeah, listening to folks and, you know, really processing what they&#8217;re asking for in terms of how they want to receive education. \u2053 yeah, I think that those elements of the experience, even the fact that I don&#8217;t<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">work with more than one guest at a time as I have scaled over the course of my career. I think that&#8217;s one question that I continue to get even as I moved into, you know, a space that had a larger square footage. It was like, great. Now you&#8217;re going to be able to hire on folks and have assistance and have somebody else in the room. And I&#8217;ve always kind of stood 10 toes down on the concept that my guests are a compensating me for work with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (33:29)<br>Yeah. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (33:29)<br>\u2053 But also<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">for many of my guests, they are in positions where outside of the salon, they are compared to their colleagues or people in their family. And I wanted this space or whatever space I created to be one where people could only be comparing themselves to our last visit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">or to where we started at the beginning of the day versus where we left at the end of the day and not have to look to the right and go, but that guest has longer hair. but that guest is farther along in their journey than I am. And how come I am not there? I never wanted that to be a part of the experience for my guests. And so that&#8217;s been something that&#8217;s always been really, really critical for me to stick with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (34:18)<br>Yeah, yeah, actually that same hairdresser that that affected me the most at the beginning. He was the same way. Everybody else was using me as the assistant to get their client to the chair to wash their hair, to remove their foils to if they were doing perms, which was happening at the beginning of my career, I might put the neutralizer on at the sink for them. They wrapped it. And that was the last time they touched it, except for a little finish at the end. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (34:24)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, of course, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (34:48)<br>And there were people that liked that sort of\u2026 \u2053 I don&#8217;t know. Everybody&#8217;s working for you. I don&#8217;t know how to describe it. There were people that liked that. Sure, everybody likes that part, but\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (34:57)<br>Yeah, I mean, if you&#8217;re the one at the top of the pyramid, it&#8217;s great. Right? I mean, but we also<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">can&#8217;t like skip over the fact that the individuals that are doing the most physically demanding work are also the ones that are exposed to the most degree of noxious chemicals that are doing the\u2026 It&#8217;s all \u2053 so inextricably tied to me that it always felt like I was\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was being remiss if I didn&#8217;t talk about these elements of our industry because it&#8217;s like, if we skip over that part, then we don&#8217;t understand anything about how the structure even works, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (35:31)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">funny<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">you bring up noxious chemicals part of the main reason i went fully independent was \u2053 i just had terrible allergies every day<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (35:44)<br>Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (35:45)<br>And it was killing me. And I was fairly<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">aware that they didn&#8217;t exist before I regularly did hair color. And when I made the change to, I&#8217;m not going to say non-toxic, I wouldn&#8217;t rub it in my eye, but low toxic, less toxic products, cleaner products, understanding what was used, understanding the greenwashing side of things, that made a huge difference to me, huge difference. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (35:52)<br>There you go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Less toxic. Yeah. No tox- yeah, yeah, Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm. I bet. Massive. mean,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">for me, even by the time I was done with beauty school, I had to see a dermatologist because I had second degree burns on my hands. Just, and I thought like, gosh, is it because I&#8217;m, am I sensitive? Is there something, do I have an allergy? And it was like, no, you&#8217;re being, right, so definitely my fault. \u2053 But it was wild to, you know, be like, I&#8217;m not even doing this full time yet. And my body,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (36:19)<br>Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s you, obviously. Yeah, I mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (36:39)<br>is my skin&#8217;s burning off, my rotator cuff is popping out, and I&#8217;m being told, well, that&#8217;s just how this work is, little girl. Like, the infantilization of people in our industry was also so \u2053 nonsensical to me. was like, if we treat people like they&#8217;ve got a brain, they will rise to the occasion. And this, you know, this profession has some truly brilliant individuals that are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (36:43)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes. Expect more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (37:09)<br>you know, I think being exploited because many of them have not had the opportunity to study the full scope of impact of the things that they&#8217;re exposed to. But if they did, they would make different choices, right? And so I think that for, even if I kind of relate that to my business, I have a lot of guests that for many years chose to use processes where they expose themselves to things that they&#8217;re now facing health ramifications for, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (37:18)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (37:37)<br>And so seeking out salon spaces where they know that they will not have their body be aggravated is of great importance. And it feels weird to them that that&#8217;s something that&#8217;s so hard to find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (37:52)<br>Yeah. I remember the smell difference when I started working in a space and people were like, what&#8217;s that I smell? And I&#8217;m like, not toxic chemicals. I know we can have a tendency to get attached like, you I love the smell of the gas station. Is that good? No, I&#8217;m just attached to it. In the same way that I know some people like the smell of a perm. I never did, but whatever. But it smells so nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (37:56)<br>\u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Is it great? Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I always tell my guests,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I always say the bulk of the things I will use here at the salon are fragrance free products. If you like scents, that&#8217;s awesome. And I will tip you off to equivalent products that have varying scent profiles that perform similarly. But my base is always going to be seeking out things that don&#8217;t have a scent. \u2053 Also, a lot of my guests I find when I first start working with them are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">being bombarded with the idea that they have to use a multitude of products, oftentimes from a multitude of lines. And then they end up walking around, smelling like a coconut, a pineapple, vanilla, lavender, and bubblegum. And you&#8217;re like, this is wild, know? \u2053 Right, and I mean, it is, I think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (38:50)<br>yes. yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Totally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Is this working for you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (39:08)<br>I like to play devil&#8217;s advocate, but for 12 years now, I&#8217;ve been asking every single major brand I engage with, would you consider a fragrance free product? And I&#8217;m usually just laughed at to my face. And it&#8217;s like, okay, well tell that to all of the guests that I see who are like, my gosh, now my dermatitis is not flaring up. Now this is not an issue that I thought was an issue. It&#8217;s like all of these things that they thought they were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">having issues with were actually reactivity to things that they were habitually exposing themselves to. Right? So it&#8217;s like if you can show people your expertise that way by being like, hey, I have seen a thousand heads of hair that are similar. Let&#8217;s try this and process of elimination this and see if we can uncover some of the problems that you&#8217;re experiencing. I think that once you start to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (39:38)<br>Yeah, Well, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (40:02)<br>quickly fix problems that have been problems for people for decades, they start to trust you in a different way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (40:08)<br>Yeah, I feel so happy for not all new hairstylists, but\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You know, there&#8217;s lots of negatives to social media. I could name a thousand. We could go on and on and on. But the way in which it&#8217;s allowed \u2053 certain communities to find each other. I was alone. And I&#8217;m sure you were alone. You know, so much so many of us were alone in what we were looking for. And actually not even alone. I was probably like you, given the impression there wasn&#8217;t anywhere. There was no one and nothing. It&#8217;s not that. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (40:21)<br>Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm. Very much so. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And what you&#8217;re asking for is actually bad. it&#8217;s, like it&#8217;s,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">you&#8217;re doing something wrong by asking for that scenario.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (40:51)<br>yeah and and i and i&#8217;m hoping more people can find what they&#8217;re looking for now i you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (40:56)<br>Yeah, yeah, as somebody<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">who tends to be on the sort of early adopter side of tech and loves the sort of UI UX conversations around technology, it is I think a double edged sword, right? If I think 10 years ago when my guests went online, they often had a hard time to your point identifying, hey, here&#8217;s somebody who might have hair pattern that&#8217;s similar to mine that I can use as a frame of reference, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (41:04)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (41:26)<br>where now they have the, or the challenges now that they are flooded with hundreds of thousands of people who are saying, I&#8217;m exactly like you and this is what you need to do. And those are all different permutations of instructions. And so it went from, have nothing to now we have tons of inaccurate information or misguided information that is typically being<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (41:53)<br>I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (41:55)<br>either through brands that want you to purchase something or influencers that they have paid to get you to purchase something. So it becomes very hard for guests. I think that they voice a lot, and this is not just my work, this is I think across the board in our industry, that&#8217;s really hard to sort of see the forest for the trees sometimes. Or they may go to someone who is a self-identified expert who tells them, a lot of my guests here, some version of,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (42:02)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, absolutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (42:24)<br>Cool, you need to co-wash, you need to clarifying wash, you need to hydrating wash, you need to have a conditioner, you need have a deep conditioner, you need to do a bond rebuilder, you need to have a leave-in, you need to have a cream, you need to have a foam, you need to have a gel, and then you need to finish things up with an oil to break up this rock you&#8217;ve created on your head of a helmet, and then, and you refresh it every day. Like that, it&#8217;s bananas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (42:49)<br>That&#8217;s bananas. That&#8217;s ridiculous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (42:52)<br>It&#8217;s \u2053 offensive to me that \u2053 that line of thinking has become so popular. think that guests are pretty categorically shocked when I tell them that nobody needs to own more than five things. And most of my guests are using three things on a regular basis, right? A shampoo, condition, and a styling product. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (43:09)<br>No, what, I mean\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (43:18)<br>And that in fact, many of the issues that they are experiencing are actually being exacerbated by the products that they&#8217;re using, right? So they&#8217;re being told, hey, your hair, you dry coat it in oil. And nobody sat down with them to explain to them that this is actually going to make their hair more water resistant and that they are chasing a dragon effectively. \u2053 so, you know, I think I&#8217;m always in this quest to kind of help people better understand the tools available to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">at this stage in our industry since it is such a dynamic thing. It&#8217;s like, yeah, I may have seen you five years ago and that may have been the best shampoo, but now we&#8217;ve got this, right? Or maybe we had the best brush and now we have an improvement, right? And so that openness to always be iterating, I think is also really important \u2053 in so far as you can do it and maintain your integrity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (43:55)<br>Yeah, it got better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. my gosh, I love it so much. I, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (44:14)<br>I mean, you&#8217;re<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">on the tech side too though, right? So you understand what a pivotal difference it can make to give somebody a smooth interface as they book with you or write like for in my experience, \u2053 for me, my intake process is actually really, really critical to the success of my business. And I&#8217;ve been kind of hyping up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (44:31)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (44:43)<br>getting other Silas into doing more sort of due diligence to set themselves up for success so that they&#8217;re not \u2053 ever in a state of like, gosh, how do I deal with this when somebody walks through the door, right? I think that it also really \u2053 establishes us for our guests as, wow, they&#8217;re really going to come correct, right? I always kind of breaks my heart a little bit when guests walk in and they say,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (44:57)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (45:11)<br>\u2053 you&#8217;re ready for me? And it&#8217;s like, I&#8217;ve been here for an hour prepping the room. I&#8217;ve been looking through your past records. I&#8217;ve been reading about, I&#8217;ve been researching the products you listed in the, you know, that you&#8217;re using in case I&#8217;m at all unfamiliar with them because I want to know what the ingredients are. And it&#8217;s like, \u2053 it breaks my heart that the last 15 years you&#8217;ve not had an on-time hairdresser, let alone one that cares about you as a guest. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (45:29)<br>yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (45:40)<br>So I feel like it&#8217;s really important for us to uphold those standards, not only for ourselves, but also so that our clients can respect the work that they&#8217;re putting into their own health and aesthetic things too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (45:41)<br>I.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, when I started using like, I put an intake form in front of my online booking link for anybody that isn&#8217;t getting just a haircut. I could do it for everything. Cause I want to know, what do you like about your hair? What do you not like about your hair? Tell me. I want to know how I can make sure you leave feeling better than when you arrived. I want to know your budget because I want to know what version of what I think you need is something you can pay for. I don&#8217;t want you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (46:02)<br>Yes. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Absolutely. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (46:25)<br>i want to find something for everyone i don&#8217;t want to turn people away unless i think i&#8217;m not the person for you like if i feel like you know what there&#8217;s somebody that&#8217;s so much i can just tell that you&#8217;re perfect for this person i know yes<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (46:31)<br>Sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, yes. I love being able to do that. That&#8217;s actually like, love, yeah,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">like I love being able to be like, you know what? You want electric green hair and I have gotten just the person for you, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (46:49)<br>Yeah, like I don&#8217;t and that&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">a great example for me because I don&#8217;t do because I haven&#8217;t traditionally had a huge clientele that love sort of like big bright fashion colors. I don&#8217;t get to do a lot of it. So that whole ability to put rainbow in a single chunk of hair, you don&#8217;t you got to go see do you want to this person you see? Just don&#8217;t want it. No, you you don&#8217;t want to see somebody that did it that one time you want to see somebody that did it 10 times last week. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (46:58)<br>Good night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, yeah. I&#8217;m not, I&#8217;m not, I&#8217;m not, you&#8217;re not my point man on that one? Nah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, yeah. Yes,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">no, mean, that&#8217;s man, that&#8217;s such an important point. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (47:18)<br>don&#8217;t want to turn any person away, but I don&#8217;t<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">want someone seeing me \u2053 for something where they can. It&#8217;s not even that I can&#8217;t do it. It&#8217;s that there&#8217;s someone that&#8217;s even better at it and you&#8217;re going to have the best time. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (47:30)<br>Yes. Yes, I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">love working synergistically with other stylists, right? And to me that, while I&#8217;ve not had the in-person day-to-day stylist interaction that I would necessarily have working in a multi-chair salon, I&#8217;ve found community that way, right? By being able to say, \u2053 one of my favorite guests in the whole world is moving to a new city. Let&#8217;s set you up with this other practitioner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (47:37)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (47:59)<br>who I know is going to offer you a level of care that is comparable to what you become accustomed to with me. And that is like, that lights me up. Like I don&#8217;t see that as a loss in any way. It&#8217;s like, my gosh, continuity of care. Like we love to see it, you know? So that has been affirming to me in this industry as somebody who oftentimes works in a way that&#8217;s,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (48:06)<br>Exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (48:26)<br>pretty siloed and realistically for the last year, I have not been online strategically. So I decided to take about a year off of Instagram. And it&#8217;s been a really cool learning experience. It&#8217;s definitely different, but has also allowed me to, I think, \u2053 explore some things about my own practice that I might have talked myself out of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (48:32)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Good for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (48:53)<br>when I was so over inundated with what other people were doing on the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (48:58)<br>Well it is a little bit of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I mean, it felt like we reached a point, especially with Instagram, where most hairdressers&#8217; accounts were for hairdressers. Like it was this, \u2053 that wasn&#8217;t built for guests. It wasn&#8217;t built, for business. It was built to, I don&#8217;t know, impress each other. And, yeah. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (49:11)<br>Yes. Yes. No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It was just a flexing competition, it felt like, in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">many respects, right? And \u2053 it also, think for me, in a lot of ways, started to feel like\u2026 \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">people were just, they were affiliating themselves with maybe a brand or a platform, for example. But I also had a lot of DMs from people that were like, hey, I actually don&#8217;t like using any of this stuff that I post about all the time. What should I be using, Kia? Tell me for free. And it always was such a, like just a very surreal experience, right? To have folks that were being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (49:51)<br>Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How can I be better? Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (50:04)<br>uplifted and platformed as industry leaders privately admitting, \u2053 I don&#8217;t actually like that either, but I&#8217;m contracted to use it and they pay me very well. I don&#8217;t need to be a part of that. It does not serve me to be a part of that or around that kind of environment because I think that that kind of stuff just gets really normalized, unfortunately, in the same way that like our industry really needs to have like HR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (50:17)<br>No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (50:32)<br>You know, like there are so many things where like we just need \u2053 We need to be able to have more respect for our profession I think \u2053 because it&#8217;s it&#8217;s like it&#8217;s it&#8217;s what we do is a really big deal regardless of if all elements of society uplift the work that we do we are you know, we&#8217;re very integral to the lives of our community members \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (50:32)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m too opinionated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We know it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (51:01)<br>And so I really think that the salon itself is actually, that&#8217;s a third space that is actually really important for us to uphold, you know? Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (51:10)<br>Yeah. I think we saw it at the height of COVID. I think we got to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">see like when we got to come back, a whole bunch of people realized its value and its worth. Not everybody and it didn&#8217;t last forever, but for a little bit there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (51:17)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For a while it did and, know, it&#8217;s funny to go back to, you you talked about like people offering services that they weren&#8217;t equipped to offer. I think back to when I worked in suites and pretty frequently I would have other stylists like pop their head in and say, hey, I&#8217;ve got somebody in my chair and I don&#8217;t know what to do. Can you tell me real quick? I told them I had to go to the bathroom. And it was like, do you think I can in the time it takes somebody to use the bathroom, explain to you my<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (51:45)<br>huh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (51:55)<br>my craft, like that&#8217;s, I would love to teach you. I actually am a professional educator. There are ways to learn now. And so to bring it back to education, I think that 10 years ago, it was a lot easier to fall back on, \u2053 gosh, there&#8217;s just nowhere to go. And there&#8217;s so, it&#8217;s so hard to get educated about these things, but now that&#8217;s not as viable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (51:56)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here&#8217;s my website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (52:21)<br>of a line, I think, whether or not people want to compensate or seek out the education that exists, that&#8217;s another conversation. But there is, there is, right? But it&#8217;s like there is education now, there is both \u2053 brand specific education and there are independent educators that have tons of different approaches and portfolios. So if you&#8217;re saying like,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (52:30)<br>Sure, that&#8217;s a big conversation. I&#8217;ll have that another time. That&#8217;s fine. Let&#8217;s do that again. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (52:47)<br>I have $3,000 to fly to the same balayage class every year. Like, okay, cool, you&#8217;re doing that because you want to be photographed with certain people, but like, is that actually improving on your craft? I don&#8217;t know. I think\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (52:59)<br>No. I mean, I&#8217;m sure, I&#8217;m okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m sure it is to some degree, iteratively. Sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (53:05)<br>Maybe to some degree,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">but I think that as somebody who can&#8217;t, I can&#8217;t walk into any of those places and receive even a head wash. How are you that great? Not to be like a turkey about it, right? But like, if you are the best hairstylist in the world, I think that there&#8217;s something a little bit earth shattering or paradigm shifting about somebody like me walking in and potentially saying, I broke my hand and I can&#8217;t wash my hair. Can you just wash my hair? I have an event tonight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (53:18)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (53:35)<br>You can&#8217;t do that. So instead, they make their environment so deeply unfriendly to anybody who doesn&#8217;t fit this prescribed aesthetic that like, you know, I teach a class on cultural competence. And one of the things is like, if I walk into a salon and I don&#8217;t see any products I can use, I don&#8217;t see any dryers that work with my hair or a hooded dryer. You can say all sorts of things about what a great job you would do for me. But I know that that&#8217;s just not possible because you don&#8217;t have the tools at reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right? And so there are so many ways that we can signify to guests that we actually do care and we are putting in the work, right? And that&#8217;s regardless of how we identify. I know people that are doing this work that don&#8217;t have any personal quote unquote connection with having hair that doesn&#8217;t grow out of their head straight, but they have really done their due diligence to seek out educators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2053 who can teach them about that and constantly reference back to those educators as well. Those are the people that I tend to gravitate towards working with and loving to partner with in an educational sense, aside from the stuff that I do that is building out my own educational curriculum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (54:33)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, I&#8217;m cognizant of time. I don&#8217;t want to take too much of your time. I know we&#8217;ve already basically come close to hitting our hour mark. But I just wanted to ask you, but we&#8217;ll I&#8217;ll try and convince you to do this one more time another time or 10 more times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (55:06)<br>I don&#8217;t think you&#8217;re<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">gonna have to convince me. I think it was pretty cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (55:13)<br>We&#8217;ll<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">do some more. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (55:16)<br>Listen,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m just trying to get them back to Vancouver, period. Loved it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (55:19)<br>Well, let&#8217;s try and create an event of some sort. know, yeah, I know we&#8217;re gonna do a, we&#8217;re gonna try and do a dress code project event pretty quick here, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we need, I don&#8217;t think any have been done in Vancouver and we need to. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (55:22)<br>Right? Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2053 that&#8217;s fantastic. That&#8217;s fantastic. Cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Really?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (55:41)<br>It&#8217;s not for lack of a community. And there are, and I shouldn&#8217;t say anything. There have been no, that I know of no dress code project specific events. There&#8217;s lots of people doing all sorts of amazing work here. But I just want to bring one of those just because, know, you know, I love them. Yeah, it&#8217;s good stuff. But let&#8217;s see if we can come up with a reason to pay you money and get you to come here and do something. I&#8217;ll think of something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (55:43)<br>Yeah. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Specific. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. It&#8217;s good stuff. Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I like those<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (56:10)<br>Before we finish up, didn&#8217;t even get a chance to ask at what point you got into education, because I can tell through what you&#8217;ve told me that you wanted to almost at minute one. But at what point did you realize that was going to be a part of what you did?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (56:21)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sure, part of my career before I became a hairdresser was in online curriculum development and online community development and web development. And so I think that it was a logical progression, right? Because it&#8217;s sort of how my brain is structured. It&#8217;s how I tend to synthesize information and regurgitate information. And so\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (56:33)<br>\u2053 wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (56:54)<br>When I was in school, I think I was even thinking about how would I rewrite this, right? I went to college and studied English, right? So all of these parts of my personality that some people might look at and think are disparate actually to me are like, no, it makes total sense you guys. Like just stay hybridized in a different way. \u2053 But I really started \u2053 focusing on education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (57:12)<br>yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (57:24)<br>a bit more in earnest, would say around 2017, that&#8217;s when I started to teach larger format classes. \u2053 And those were in-person classes, hands-on classes as well. And \u2053 learned a lot through that experience, learned a lot about the structures and positives and negatives of working with \u2053 trendy salons or salons that have clout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (57:52)<br>Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (57:54)<br>Right. And<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">kind like we talked about other, you know, earlier, their desire to have minoritized people so that they can look like they have a co-sign. Right. So at first it was like, what an exciting experience. get to teach them these things. And then you open up the door and you go, gosh, this actually might still need some work. and so that helped reinforce the idea that I can really build out education of my own. Right. And then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">when the pandemic happened and we were no longer allowed to touch individuals, right? It was, gosh, Kia, you truly have no excuse to not sit down and create some of these things that you have all over the place and actually aggregate them and start to put them into curricula, right? That makes sense for people. And so I spent months and months working on that and released my first<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (58:46)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (58:52)<br>online education in 2020 and offered a series of classes, \u2053 paid classes, and also a series called Deeper Dive, where I examined \u2053 many of the popular brands at the time that were marketing to diverse clientele and helped, hopefully, not only stylists, but also consumers understand how to advocate for themselves in a better way, right? How do you look at a website and say like, okay, well, do they have befores and afters?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (59:16)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (59:22)<br>Okay, well, why are they hiding the ingredients? Okay, well, they say they do this, but is there any proof in the pudding, right? And starting to allow people to trust their instincts more and just be more informed consumers. I think that&#8217;s one of the most helpful things that we can do. also, you know, like if you&#8217;ve informed your guests and they&#8217;re educated and they still choose to come back to you, that to me means more than.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (59:25)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (59:49)<br>people coming to you out of desperation because you&#8217;re the only person who offers a service. Yeah, so that might, know, educational track. Again, probably a little bit nonconventional because I was not working in conjunction with any brands. But again, I needed to be able to use what I found to be most effective. And still to this day, I have not encountered<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (59:54)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (1:00:17)<br>any brands that from start to finish allow me to have necessarily that fine tuned experience that I want. And so it remains really important to me to be able to constantly be, you know, iterating. But also the reality is so many of these brands do what I call quiet reformulation, right? Which is they change it up and they keep it in the same bottle and they keep the goodwill of the community and they gaslight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (1:00:26)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (1:00:46)<br>consumers and silas about the changes that have been made, right? And so if we&#8217;re more informed about things that have the tools and the language to be able to describe what we&#8217;re experiencing and what our goals are for our bodies, \u2053 then it becomes a lot easier to call stuff out when it&#8217;s It&#8217;s not jiving, you know? Because you know, you&#8217;re like, no. And I like to give my guests a lot of credit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (1:01:06)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (1:01:11)<br>I&#8217;m like, know your body better than I know your body. I might&#8217;ve been working with you for five years, but you live in this body. So if something feels wrong or isn&#8217;t clicking, then let&#8217;s figure it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (1:01:17)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. That&#8217;s amazing. You&#8217;re amazing. I&#8217;m so glad you exist. Thank you. Yeah, this is so much fun. I definitely want to do it again. Before we go, \u2053 where can people find you? What are you working on right now? What do people need to know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (1:01:26)<br>\u2053 thank you, Liam. This was really fun. No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It feels like I&#8217;m on Hot Ones, right? Show with hot questions and even hotter wings. When are we gonna do a Hot Wings version of your podcast, right? Just eating spicy food while interviewing people. \u2053 You can find me at thecurlconsultant.com. I am on Instagram at Kia, the Curl Consultant. \u2053 I am currently working on building out some cool new educational offerings. am\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (1:01:42)<br>Right? Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let&#8217;s do it in person. Let&#8217;s go to the\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (1:02:08)<br>working on building out a class with my dear colleague, Aaron Scott Lacey, who&#8217;s based in San Diego. We co-teach as well. \u2053 And working on building out a few classes for my salon here that I&#8217;m going to be sharing in the next month or so. So offering classes here in my salon, one-on-one and small group classes. also teach<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (1:02:14)<br>Nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, I it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (1:02:31)<br>in salons. also teach occasionally at our local community college and traveling to teach. yeah, you know, I also I&#8217;m just really passionate about the intersection of how hair is rendered in digital media. And so that&#8217;s a lot of the work that I do as well is examining things like how do cameras render hair that is not straight \u2053 and the ways that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (1:02:36)<br>Good for you. That&#8217;s amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (1:02:59)<br>manufacturers can improve their processes to more accurately reflect the populations that they serve. So that&#8217;s the stuff that I&#8217;m really passionate about. And that&#8217;s all the stuff that I&#8217;m working on. And if I win the lottery, then I&#8217;ll have my own line, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (1:03:01)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I love it, right? That&#8217;s the dream. That&#8217;s the dream. I&#8217;m with you. All right, well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (1:03:16)<br>That&#8217;s the dream. Yeah, yeah. But those<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">are the, this has been really, really awesome. So I really appreciate all of the super thoughtful \u2053 things that we got to talk about. It&#8217;s been really cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (1:03:22)<br>Fantastic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">not sure I thought of any of them. think I just opened my mouth and and you took it from there. But thank you. We&#8217;ll do it again. And yeah, let&#8217;s talk again soon. Appreciate it. You too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kia Donovan (1:03:32)<br>\u2053 gosh, thank you, Leon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Awesome, very cool. Take care. Okay, bye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Kia Donovan Talks, the Industry Has to Listen Sitting down with Kia Donovan felt less like a formal interview and more like one of those conversations that keeps opening new doors every few minutes. We started with Bay Area stories, food talk, and a little swearing permission check, and somehow within minutes we were &#8230; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more-container\"><a title=\"Kia Donovan on Hair, Care, and Doing Better Behind the Chair\" class=\"read-more button\" href=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/kia-donovan-on-hair-care-and-doing-better-behind-the-chair\/#more-8452\" aria-label=\"Read more about Kia Donovan on Hair, Care, and Doing Better Behind the Chair\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8455,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[512],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-digital-chair-podcast-transcribed","infinite-scroll-item","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8452"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8602,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8452\/revisions\/8602"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}