Posted Tuesday, November 8, 2011 by G. J. Frisco,

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“Prague is an amazing place for inspiration. In some ways it is like a fairy tale city. But remember that it is also a city that is new in this life of a free country. And we are still finding people who are coming into the salon with not so much vision of their own beauty. So if you are strong enough as a hairdresser then this is the best place to be because there is only so much you can get out of the history. You can be inspired by the artists like Kafka but really we are only beginning here. It’s only twenty years that we are a free country which is really no time. Here we are still discovering beauty and so you still can play, you can be a little bit American, a little bit childish. We get to feel good that we are helping people not just because they have a nice haircut but also because they are still discovering who they are.”    
Libor Sula

Libor Sula owns the salon as well as the advanced training academy that bears his name in Prague in the Czech Republic. Recognized as a prestigious Kerastase Institute, Libor Sula, The Salon is located in the historic Old Town district. Libor sat down with us at the Four Season Hotel in Prague for a wide ranging discussion of his life as a hairdresser and the phenomenal success of his business.

HSM. Welcome to the Four Seasons Hotel and thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. We’d like to give our readers an introduction to you and we always like to start with the identity question, “Who is Libor?”

LS. Well, first of all I’m a hairdresser and also I’m a good person. Maybe it should be the other way around but hairdressing is really my life. If I were not challenged to change something like the way I change people’s hair, then my life would be just half, not fulfilled.

HSM. How did you get interested in hairdressing? Perhaps I should ask how did you discover your life’s work?

LS. Well, I would like to say it was something I knew when I was born, but when I was nine my mother came home with a bad haircut. And already at that age I thought to myself that I had to change it somehow. Even then I felt like “I can do this.” As soon as I started working with hair I could feel the way it was growing. I knew this would be my life’s work.”

HSM. That’s definitely the best answer I’ve ever heard about being born a hairdresser. But how did you go from feeling it as a calling to being technically trained in the profession?

LS. When I was twelve I told my father I wanted to be a hairdresser and he said “No way.” But then when I was fourteen I told him I was gay and I still want to be a hairdresser. And he said. “OK, well, you have to choose. You can be a hairdresser or you can be gay. But you can’t be both.” So it was a difficult choice then but at that age I changed my education to technical school and completed my training as a hairdresser.

HSM. That must have been a tough choice if it was presented as an either or option?

LS. When I was eighteen I realized I couldn’t live with the choice my father gave me so I made the difficult decision to leave home. I packed my suite case and I went to London. I started with Tony and Guy but I was not happy there because I consider myself a conservative hairdresser. I love the look of luxury.

HSM. Your collection images on your website I would say are identifiable as “classic” looks. I didn’t see anything that would be described as “trendy” or “edgy.”

LS. What I’m looking to create is a very pure, very much the look of timeless beauty, which means that our clients tend to be 30 and over because they have been through the age of gimmicks.”

HSM. So from London how did you wind up back in Prague?

LS. I travelled to a few other cities. I worked in Germany and Italy for a while but after I while I returned to Prague and I knew this would be my home. As you will find here Prague has an amazing energy. It is in the air like magic. Europe after the war was changed so fast but here many things were kept the same way until the revolution in 1989. So now I have the chance to work with people who are discovering their beauty and its expressions in the way they wear their hair.

HSM. Speaking of the way your clients discover their beauty in the salon, tell me about the way the services are done there. Is the cut and color divided into departments?

LS. No no no. I believe the best way for the client to feel the luxury of a salon experience is to have one person caring about you for two hours. We don’t work with assistants the way many of my American colleagues do. I realize this would allow us to have more people through the salon and it would be better for the bottom line of my business but that’s not the way we work at my salon. One person takes care of the client from beginning to the end.

HSM. What was it like going from being an employee stylist to being a business owner? That must have been a big decision.

LS. No it wasn’t. We are a very old culture but we are a very young country. As soon as I had the opportunity I opened my salon and I never looked back. I was the first one to open a salon like Libor Sula and never let anyone overtake me. In London, if I had started there it would have been a very different decision. There it would have been much harder. There is a well established salon world. The top owners are all in their fifties. So it would have been much harder for me to break in there. I was twenty when I started my business. Now it is fifteen years later and I have seventy employees.

HSM. The salon is a Kerastase Institute which is a prestigious honor for you. Tell me about the influence of L’Oreal and Kerastase and how that works with the Libor brand.

LS. I did try all the brands. I needed support. I needed someone who would stand behind me as I was growing my business. I also need the product that works with the hair that we are working on every day and for me the best choice was L’Oreal and Kerastase.

HSM. The salon looks amazing. We have some images of the salon from the website and even though they show off the salon very well, now that I’ve been there I can tell you they don’t do it justice. Describe what went in to the design and how it all came together.

LS. I designed the salon myself. The image I had in my head when I started was a big beautiful living room with friendly colors. I don’t like too much things that are visually pushy because then the client starts to feel the tension. I used the best materials in the construction and even in the day to day life of the salon I use the best florist in Prague and it all works to create a place where the client feels at home.

HSM. How does the staff work into that grand plan?

LS. I know you can have an amazing salon with all the best materials but you must have a staff that carries the brand all the way to the customer experience. I choose the staff so that even if I cannot work in the salon, the client experience is the same as if I am doing the service myself.

HSM. Is that why you developed the Libor Academy?

LS. Yes. I found that the only way to create the consistent quality of the work in the salon is to train my staff from the beginning. Many of my colleagues have told me that I put too much into the training and education and then sometimes they don’t work out or they leave and go to another salon or maybe even start their own salon but I don’t imagine how Libor Sula could be the salon it is today without this commitment we have to training and education. And honestly, my experience over the last fifteen years is that almost everyone I knew from the beginning was going to make it, wind up staying and those are the people who never leave.

HSM. I’ve only just arrived in Prague and I can’t say that I’ve seen enough to make too many conclusions but one of the things you can’t help but notice is the sense of history and the roots of Prague as a crossroads of European culture and learning. How has that affected the salon?

LS. Well, Prague is an amazing place for inspiration. In some ways it is like a fairy tale city. But remember that it is also a city that is new in this life of a free country. And we are still finding people who are coming into the salon with not so much vision of their own beauty. So if you are strong enough as a hairdresser then this is the best place to be because there is only so much you can get out of the history. You can be inspired by the artists like Kafka but really we are only beginning here. It’s only twenty years that we are a free country which is really no time. Here we are still discovering beauty and so you still can play, you can be a little bit American, a little bit childish. We get to feel good that we are helping people not just because they have a nice haircut but also because they are still discovering who they are.

HSM. You mentioned the newness of the country and just to help our readers put this in perspective, Prague is an ancient city but before 1989 it was part of a Communist country. Let’s talk a little bit about what that means in terms of terms of the way new clients come into the salon today.

LS. A big plus about being here is that people are hungry to get the best in style to learn. They want someone to help them to navigate and find their own style.

HSM. Do you notice any differences between the generation that came of age before the revolution and the way the younger clients experience the salon? Is there more of a self consciousness among your older clients?

LS. A lot of people here say that the generation 35 and up is not “useable” but that isn’t true. You just have to know how to talk to them and work with them.

HSM. Just imagine though for someone born in the fifties or sixties, they would have grown up in a totalitarian state with extreme limitations on freedom expression. It’s not so hard to imagine that they lost their way in having a sense of beauty and style.

LS. Before the revolution we only had one model. It was the same with the dresses and the hair.

HSM. Was there even a hairdressing profession at all?

LS. Not really in the sense we know it now. The only thing women did was get their hair cut to make it shorter. The only conversation with the hairdresser was how many centimeters to cut off. The people didn’t need to even think about style. Everyone cared the most about conforming. If the dresses one year were green, then everything else was green. Everyone had a green dress. So in that way women of that generation became a little bit lazy. They would say “Why should I worry about what I should wear if I know that when I go to the shop everyone will be wearing green.”

HSM. Then came the revolution

LS. Yes. And suddenly the people started thinking to themselves “something is running away from us. We have to catch it. We have to do something.” And then, in this way, we all realized we have a chance to start something new. That’s why even the McDonalds here don’t look so bad because they are all new. If you go to Holland maybe you see a McDonalds that is fifty or sixty years old. Here all the shopping malls, they are all new. We have not had the time to get older and dirty.

HSM. Let’s talk a little bit about current events. Every day in the papers we read about the economic calamity that seems to be impacting people all over the world and especially in some places in Europe like Greece and a few other countries that are even talking about defaulting on their national debt. How has that impacted consumer behavior in your market?

LS. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I was afraid. I was reading all this stuff about the economy and I was worrying that this will be the time when clients will cut the money they spend on the hairdresser so they will have money for food. But I am honestly able to tell you that we are even fuller than before. I do think that a great many people who were in the middle class, they disappeared. And so we have to work harder to reach an audience that can afford our prices. But the difference between our prices and not such good salons in Prague is not that great. We make sure that we deliver something special so they find a way to come back to us. This is their taste of affordable luxury in their lives.

HSM. Speaking of prices, let’s do a quick comparison for our US readers on what a haircut costs In your salon.

LS. The top prices for a haircut in my salon are $150 but you can also get your haircut for $50.

HSM. And what about color? We talked about your target audience being 35 and older. So I would imagine most of them would be concerned with grey coverage.

LS. What to do about covering grey hair is always a big question. I’m not a fan of covering grey in a completely uniform way. Our salon specializes in highlights. Almost 100% of our color clients are getting some form of highlights. None of our clients are leaving the salon with a uniform color. We want to see some movements in the color and there are no two colors that leave the salon the same.

HSM. Let’s talk about the future. Here you are a young man at the top of your profession running the most successful salon in the Eastern Europe. What do you see as the future for Libor Sula personally and for Libor Sula Salon.

LS. I’ve had fantastic offers from France to buy my name and open fifty salons but my salon and my employees and my clients are my family. So even though the offers are appealing I don’t think this is something I will give up anytime soon.

HSM. Libor thank you so much for taking the time to visit with our readers today. It’s been great to meet you and to learn about the life of your business in such a fascinating time and place.

LS. It was my pleasure. Thank you.