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SEARCHIn Spring 2016, Qnity partnered with SALON TODAY to host the Emerging Leader Cup for a competition designing the salon of tomorrow. Emerging Leaders is a subset of membership of 2 to 10, an association for salons that operate businesses from 2 ...
In Spring 2016, Qnity partnered with SALON TODAY to host the Emerging Leader Cup for a competition designing the salon of tomorrow. Emerging Leaders is a subset of membership of 2 to 10, an association for salons that operate businesses from 2 to 10 locations. The Emerging Leaders represent members of the group who are 30 years old or younger.
For the purposes of the competition, the group was divided into three teams and charged with the mission of sketching out a beauty concept for the future. Qnity’s Tom Kuhn set the parameters for the competition and served as mentor to each of the teams, while Erin Lisabeth Kuhn organized the teams and helped facilitate the judging.
Teams worked together on the concepts for about six weeks before presenting to a group of judges that included Stefanie Fox, the owner of Canvas Salon and Skin Bar in Columbus, Ohio; James Griffith, the owner of James Griffith Salons with three locations in Florida; and Stacey Soble, the editor of Salon Today.
The teams were judged on the originality of their salon concept, how well they worked together as a team, the feasibility of their concept, and how well they presented their idea. After the presentations, the judges scored each salon and conferred together to select a winning team.
"We all were incredibly impressed with the salon concepts and the presentations, and when we scored the salons we found they were very, very close,” Fox says. “We had to devise a tie-breaker to determine a winner.”
In the end, the judges agreed that the Co-Collective team just edged the other teams out to win, but they all felt there was value in sharing the ideas of all three teams. The members of the winning team get a free ticket to next year’s 2 to 10 competition.
Here are the competing Emerging Leader Cup concepts for the salon of tomorrow:
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