Creative Head
Creative Head, styled Creative HEAD, is a British magazine and media brand for professional hairdressers, based in London, England, and published online at creativeheadmag.com. Launched in 2000, it describes itself as the leading magazine for hairdressing professionals in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and it is widely described within the industry as the most respected and influential business-to-business title for UK hairdressing. Founder and publisher Catherine Handcock launched the magazine because, in her words, the industry was changing and people were looking for something different. Over more than two decades, Creative Head grew from a magazine into a portfolio spanning print, digital editions, live events, awards and a consumer platform. Its stated aims at launch were to give a voice to session stylists, to create networking opportunities for business owners and to celebrate creative talent in new ways, and those three aims still describe its mix of editorial shoots, business insight and industry celebration.
Launched in 2000 for a Changing Industry
Creative Head arrived in 2000, at a moment when British hairdressing was professionalising rapidly: salon groups were expanding, session and editorial work carried growing prestige, and salon owners increasingly saw themselves as creative businesspeople rather than tradespeople alone. Catherine Handcock, who became the magazine's editor and later an executive board member of the British Beauty Council, has recalled how small the team was at the start and how passionate it was about its purpose. Marking the magazine's twentieth birthday in 2020, the British Beauty Council congratulated the team and situated the title within an industry of real economic weight: hair services were the largest share of the £27 billion UK consumer spend on beauty services, worth £6.3 billion, and the wider sector employed more than 121,000 people across the UK. A magazine that could speak credibly to that workforce, from salon owners to freelance stylists, had a substantial professional audience to serve.
The Magazine: Creativity and Business Together
The editorial formula of Creative Head joins two kinds of content that hairdressers need in equal measure. The first is creative inspiration: editorial shoots, trend forecasting, collections from leading stylists and coverage of the session world of fashion shows, photography and celebrity work. The second is business substance: information for the owners and managers of busy salons on running, staffing, marketing and growing a hair business. Its publisher has described it as delivering inspiration and information to the owners and managers of the UK's busiest salons, and its own site promises hair, business, fashion and industry news. That dual identity distinguishes it from a purely technical trade paper. A Creative Head reader might open an issue for a step-by-step colour story and stay for advice on salon pricing, or arrive for business networking and leave with a new creative direction for the salon floor.
Most Wanted and The It List
Creative Head's best-known creations are its awards. Most Wanted is its flagship competition for creative excellence, open to owners and employees of salons, barber shops and other workspaces providing hair services, and to self-employed and freelance hair professionals based in the UK and Ireland. Its Grand Final has been billed as the UK and Ireland's biggest hair party, and its sponsors have included major professional brands such as L'Oréal Professionnel, Wella Professionals, Kérastase, Redken, BaByliss PRO and Paul Mitchell, a sponsor list that signals the awards' commercial standing. Alongside Most Wanted sits The It List, which recognises emerging talent aged 30 and under. Together the two schemes cover the arc of a hairdressing career: The It List identifies the rising names, and Most Wanted crowns established creative achievement. Winning either can transform a stylist's profile, bringing bookings, brand work and press attention that a salon chair alone rarely delivers.
Salon Smart and Business Networking
If the awards supply Creative Head's glamour, Salon Smart supplies its boardroom. Salon Smart is the brand's business networking event, created to give salon owners the peer contact and practical thinking that isolated small-business owners often lack. It sits within a wider portfolio of live concepts that the magazine has developed over its life: The Coterie, a members-only networking club for hair and fashion professionals, which held sessions in London and, for the first time in 2018, in Manchester, where an evening on branding featured speakers including Jayson Gray, Bruce Masefield and Yolanda O'Leary; the Big Hair Do, a large-scale celebratory event; the seasonal trend bible Runway; and Self/Styled, a strand created for self-employed hair professionals. That last launch recognised a structural change in the industry, the growth of freelance, chair-rental and home-based working, and gave that growing audience content and community of its own.
Session Stylists and Fashion Connections
A founding purpose of Creative Head was to give a voice to session stylists, the hairdressers who work behind the scenes on fashion shoots, shows and campaigns, and the brand has maintained unusually close ties to that world. It has enjoyed exclusive collaborations with industry figures such as Sam McKnight, Guido and Trevor Sorbie, and working relationships with fashion commentators and creatives including designer Henry Holland and WAH Nails founder Sharmadean Reid, as well as the team at Vogue. Those connections explain the magazine's visual confidence: it treats hairdressing as part of fashion culture, not as a service trade adjacent to it. For salon stylists, that coverage offers both inspiration and a visible career ladder, showing routes from the salon floor into editorial and session work. For session stylists themselves, a trade title that understands their craft offers recognition that consumer fashion magazines, which credit photographers and designers more readily than hair teams, often do not.
Expansion into Ireland and Digital
Creative Head's growth was, as its founder put it at the twentieth anniversary, upwards and outwards. The brand launched into Ireland, formalising a readership across the UK and Ireland that its awards eligibility also reflects. It developed digital editions alongside print, and its parent company, Alfol Ltd, built platforms beyond the professional magazine itself. Chief among them is Layered, a consumer hair platform, which takes hairdressing expertise to the public, and The Industry, an education resource raising awareness of the career opportunities in hairdressing. That structure, a professional flagship plus consumer and education offshoots, mirrors the direction of modern trade publishing: the magazine remains the authority and the gathering point, while digital platforms extend its reach to clients in salon chairs and to young people choosing a career.
Catherine Handcock and Alfol Ltd
Creative Head is closely identified with its founder. Catherine Handcock is described across industry sources as the founder and publisher of the magazine, the most respected and influential B2B title for the UK hairdressing industry, and she served as its editor while also sitting on the executive board of the British Beauty Council. Under her guidance the brand expanded from a single magazine into digital editions, Layered and its portfolio of live events. Editorial director Amanda Nottage is quoted speaking for the brand at its awards, reflecting the small senior team typical of independent publishing. Alfol Ltd, the parent company, produces both the professional and consumer strands. In an industry of personalities, having a founder-publisher who remained visibly at the helm for more than twenty years gave Creative Head a consistent voice and a personal network that larger corporate publishers often struggle to replicate.
Readership and Professional Community
The readers of Creative Head are the working professionals of British and Irish hairdressing: salon owners and managers, employed stylists, colourists, session artists, freelancers and the brands that supply them. The brand's own event descriptions stress that it connects a highly engaged audience of salon owners, stylists and industry leaders across print, digital and live formats. That engagement is the product being sold to sponsors and the value delivered to readers: a community that meets in the magazine's pages, competes in its awards, networks at Salon Smart and The Coterie and follows its trend guidance in Runway. Hairdressing can be a lonely business at the top of a small salon; a title that convenes the industry physically as well as editorially answers a need that content alone cannot. Creative Head's longevity suggests it understood that need earlier than many of its competitors.
Influence on British Hairdressing
Assessments of Creative Head from within the industry credit it not merely with reflecting hairdressing trends but with actively influencing them. Its editorial voice, awards and events provide a platform for education, recognition and connection from emerging talent to established names. The It List shapes who the industry watches; Most Wanted shapes what winning looks like; Salon Smart spreads business practice between salons that would otherwise never meet. Through campaigns and live concepts it has also raised standards and fostered ambition, giving hair professionals tools, visibility and confidence to grow their careers and businesses. In a sector worth billions and employing well over a hundred thousand people in hair services alone, that convening power is significant. Creative Head began in 2000 as a small, passionate answer to an industry looking for something different; it became one of the institutions through which British hairdressing talks to itself.
Creative Head Today
More than two decades after launch, Creative Head remains a magazine-led media brand spanning print, digital and live events, headquartered in London and serving the UK and Ireland. Its portfolio, as summarised at its recent awards, includes the magazine itself, seasonal trend bible Runway, Self/Styled for the self-employed, The Coterie networking club, The It List for emerging talent, Salon Smart for business networking and the Big Hair Do celebration, with its parent company also producing the Layered consumer platform and The Industry education resource. That breadth is the modern form of the original idea: a voice for session stylists, a network for business owners and a stage for creative talent. For readers researching British hairdressing, Creative Head is both a source on the industry and one of the forces that shaped it.
