My hair feels like a million dollars #guineapiggirl

You know the new Canadian "paper" money? That's what my hair feels like. Plastic and slippery and impermeable. YUCK! A million times over....  I tried a new hair product for my weekly deep treatment on Sunday. Left it in for 3 days since I'm lazy didn't do my hair forever. Usually when I use my standard DevaCurl products and a little olive, or pure argan or camellia oil for deep treatments I get great results. I went to bed last night thinking my hair felt oddly slick and shiny. When I did my hair this morning I realized..... CONES!!! The dreaded CONES! Not pure silicone thank God, but there was dimethiCONE and another funky ingredient in this new product. I understand dimethicone can be water soluble, but whatever was in this stuff was not water soluble at all.
This product won't be on my store shelves ever.
You're welcome. I remain your curly guru, and guinea pig.
Tomorrow I should be back with my normal CONE free head. ;)

P.S. That is not a million dollars, and that is not me.....

Hail thee Festival day?

Festival Season has begun! In case you missed the updates on all our social media outposts on Sunday of the last weekend we were in Waterdown at the launch of a new local street festival. Many of you were off doing that cottage thing, or freezing your butts off at a campground wondering why every year on May 2-4 weekend you think you should be sleeping in a tent when parts of not too Northern Ontario still have frost overnight.
WE, the ellenoire team of street festival professionals were dragging our weary asses out of bed to round up the last few boxes, banners and labels and other bits and bobs that assist in us schlepping a good representation of the boutique and stuffing it into an attractive, but not too pretentious looking 10x10 tent.

A lot of my readers and followers became customers due to a festival we were set up at. Every year we set up at 3 or more local street festivals. The Dundas ones of course are our biggest ones: The Busker Festival on the first weekend in June and the Cactus Fest on the third weekend in August.
We show up at the Locke Street festival in early September every year, although one year the rain was coming down so heavily while we were trying to pack the loaner pickup truck that we had to call it a day. As you can imagine Bath Bombs and Soap do not travel well in the rain. That was the year that we started packing everything in plastic Rubbermaid tubs.

 There's never a dull moment on a festival weekend. I'm generally exhausted before they start because I do all the ordering (from 3 countries and up to 20 different suppliers) and coordinate those shipments to pass though customs smoothly so all the components of each handmade product is in place on time to get it made, cured, dried, bottled, labeled, packaged and priced. This usually takes 3 weeks before the festival starts.
 A festival crew is usually anywhere between 3 and 8 people which includes regular staff to run the store, while the rest of us are out on a street somewhere. We've helped quite a few students make a few bucks over the years. We have so much fun that they return year after year. We've employed every age from 14-70 years and occasionally I've had my son, or my brother around to help.

This is a funny one from the Busker Fest in 2011, we had only just moved into this temporary location 4 weeks earlier but still had 30 feet of tents out front on time. John was trying to not look up as Tim, in his staff uniform kilt was climbing a pole to retrieve something.

Locally we have become known for a few things in our festival tents. I'm often at one end flipping my curls around showing people how to use curly products to have perfect, frizz free hair. Hey!? If I can have no frizz while working sweaty 12 hour days in a damned tent I can teach ANYONE else to do the same. Tim is generally at other the end spritzing someone with muscle mist or showing how great their hands can feel after a sugar or salt scrub treatment in the laundry tub we use for demos. 

My favourite memory of our scrub tub comes from one year at the Locke street festival. You see, we have a 5 gallon bucket hidden under the sink drain to catch the rinse water from the hand scrub demonstration. On this particularly busy and very hot day the bucket became very full of yucky water. I have very funny picture somewhere of a friend and festival helper holding a 3/4 full bucket of greyish water mixed with a blend of sugar and salt and hand washing dirt etc. The bucket had become known as the "scum bucket" and from that day, our friend was known as "Scumbuckety Iain" 
 If I find the picture, I'll post it. It's a classic exaample of one of our "eboys" as our team of
 male festival staff have become known. 


This past week with the long days at the store and the 12 hour day at the Waterdown festival my feet were quite sore. I woke up for a few days after the festival with painfully swollen hands and feet. Since the doctors have no clue why, and I head for blood tests tomorrow this hideousness has become known as festivalitus. This is not my favourite festival memory, and I may start planning my Hobbit costume for next year. 

I need a pedicure AND I have cankles. Kill me! 

Just for putting up with this awful picture of my tree trucks for ankles you can have 10% off anything mentioned in this post until June 15th. Mention it in the store or use code "hobbit" at checkout on the website. 

We are hiring again!

Hi! What a crazy few weeks this has been! The financial reality of running a street front business during a long, cold winter means we have to keep costs very low. A lot of time was spent looking out the window at snowflakes on the street rather than people out shopping. We had a staff person move onto a new career early in the year, so I was chief receptionist, shipping manager,marketing manager, dishwasher and more!

Now that the weather has turned a corner and the snow is likely to stay away (if it snows in May, then I think a lot of people will be moving west though) we can hire someone to help me with the day to day work in the store. Please pass this information along to friends if you think you know someone who can handle this crazy place.

Still from the 1940 film His Girl Friday with Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell & Ralph Bellamy
I don't think this movie is really about a Girl friday but the pic is fun! 

 Sometimes I think the dated terms "Girl Friday" and "Man Friday", "Jack of all trades" describes this eclectic position (FYI, this position was held by a male for seven years) or even "Curl Friday" as a nod to our Curly Hair salon..... but after asking friends and clients we came up with title to describe the job

 Client Services Coordinator

The perfect candidate will have the professionalism and friendliness of a Maître D or a Hotel Concierge and the ability to juggle clients at the register, ringing phones, have precision in communication with management, clients and other staff. To be successful in this position we seek a person who can roll with the punches with an open mind while remaining calm and professional. This is an eclectic position with an attractive salary and a happy, energetic workplace.

 Job details: 
1) “Running the front desk” Cash and credit card handling, Cash register/ POS skills, greeting clients, preparing coffee for clients,

2) Booking Hair Salon clients for appointments in a natural curly hair specialty salon, this require extra attention to detail.
3) Sales of Hair and personal care products for both men and women. Simple customization and packaging of personal care products (ie labeling, gift wrapping, adding a few drops of fragrance)

4) Light Cleaning duties and retail "facing up" and simple decorating
5) A Small amount of shipping and receiving and office paperwork will also be necessary. 

These are the key points we are looking for, although there may be extra hours available for someone who wants to learn light manufacturing of personal care products. 

Ellënoire is an LGTB friendly, nursing friendly, multicultural environment so closed minds need not apply. 

 Skills and experience desired: minimum of 2 years in experience in one or more of the following: High end retail Sales, Reception, Hotel front desk or busy restaurant hostess or server positions.

 Extra notes: Above all what we need is professionalism in both manner and dress, politeness, ability to follow instruction precisely, able to stand and walk for many hours with few breaks and not be shy in communication. The ability to learn the details of and comfortably sell a large number of products in our boutique, learn the details of booking a hair client in a specialty environment, and teach clients how to use products they may not imagine using themselves.

Job Location: ellënoire, Body, Bath & Fragrance and Curly Hair Salon104 King Street west, Dundas, ON 905 627 9379

Email questions, cover letters and resumes to ellenoire@ellenoire.com.  

An Angel in Disguise

Hi everyone! Happy New Year! I Hope your holiday season was wonderful, quiet, crazy, and all of the things you needed it to be. The ellënoire staff are back at our normal schedule, inspiring curly haired clients to live natural and frizz free, making fun and functional soap, creating new recipes for awesome skin care creations and scouring the earth for new products to introduce to you.

We have a new curly angel in the ellënoire salon!  We are pleased and excited to introduce you to our newest stylist, Victoria.  Some of you have met Victoria in the salon while she was training through the fall. Victoria is a vibrant, young woman who I attended hair school with. In a bit of a gamble I offered Victoria a job this summer after we had completed the program,  hoping to entice her to come over to the curly side. Thankfully I gambled on the right girl and Victoria has turned out to be a curly angel in disguise!  Right away when we met in hair school I knew Victoria had curly hair. She had over processed, over coloured, painfully over- straightened, curly hair. Each week as I drove her home from Niagara Falls  and we got to know each other she asked me if the products I talked about would help her damaged hair and if so could she still wear it straight. Well of course I knew they would, but she always had an excuse not to try them.

It turned out my job offer came at exactly the right time for Victoria as she wasn’t very satisfied with the salon she was apprenticing at. Victoria started with us in the summer.  In fact we attended our hair school graduation together, myself as a sylist and salon owner and her with a great new job moving her career forward. Now, after 4 months of training in the ellënoire salon and her Level 1 DevaCurl Inspired Stylist course completed Victoria is more enthusiastic than I could have hoped for.  Even better she wears her hair curly every day.  Just last week when asked how she was finding working in a curly specialty salon as she replied “This is so much more satisfying than a regular salon!”  Welcome aboard Victoria!

For those of you who have not visited our salon yet, you can rest assured that both of my stylists are very excited to show up to work each day which is not something I ever recall seeing in a traditional salon…. And yes, we cut straight hair too!

P.S. Watch out on this blog, facebook, twitter and linkedin next for our new weekly sales event every Monday starting January 27^th !