Downside-first. Purpose-built. Family-run.

Twenty years ago

Where it started

I trained at Coleg Cambria and spent my early years in salons — Mold, Wrexham, Chester, Ruthin. I loved the craft of it. I have never stopped loving the craft of it. What I could not settle to was the four walls and the nine-to-five, and the feeling that the shape of the job had been decided by somebody else a long time before I arrived.

So twenty years ago I put a kit in a car and went mobile. It was not a business plan. It was a way of doing the work I wanted to do, on terms I could live with.

What I could see from the van

The bit that changed everything

Driving those lanes, I started to notice who the salon model was quietly leaving out. Elderly neighbours for whom getting into town had stopped being straightforward. Families who could not make a Tuesday at two. Whole villages up in the Clwydian Range with nothing of their own and a long single-track drive to anything else.

None of those people had decided they no longer cared how their hair looked. The industry had simply stopped being available to them.

And the work itself changed. Setting my own hours, seeing the same faces in the same kitchens year after year — clients stopped being appointments and became something closer to an extended family. Twenty years on, I still cut for people I first cut for in my twenties.

Fourteen years teaching

The view from the other side

Later I spent fourteen years in education, teaching hairdressing and barbering apprenticeships. It is a very different vantage point, and what I watched from it was the wider industry beginning to struggle.

Formal training had stretched to two years — an impossible barrier for anyone changing career, because almost nobody can stop earning for that long. At the same time salon overheads went one way only, which quietly capped what a stylist could ever take home. The choices left to good people were: stay stuck, rent a chair, or set yourself up in a shed at the bottom of the garden.

Meanwhile every other part of life had learned to come to the door. Shopping, food, prescriptions. Hair had not moved at all.

So I built a better model

Charlotte Eleanor

I created Charlotte Eleanor because both halves of that problem have the same answer, and neither of them gets solved by opening another salon.

We founded our own academy in the Clwydian Range and cut out the parts of the process that were adding time rather than skill — focused, high-calibre training built on the national standards the trade runs on. Passionate people get the tools, the equipment, the systems and the real-world experience to launch their own mobile business in months rather than years.

And on the client side, the thing I noticed from the van twenty years ago is now the whole proposition: the salon comes to you, at a time that suits your life, wherever you live.

What it actually is

Not just a mobile hairdresser

Charlotte Eleanor is not a single stylist with a diary, and it is not a salon that happens to travel. It is a collective of skilled, supported professionals bringing high-end styling, real convenience and genuine human connection to people’s front doors.

That is the whole of it. Everything else on this site — the academy, the franchise, the technology, the governance below — exists to make that possible and to keep it standing up.