Cooper Delivered · Building in Public · Hairdresser-Led Haircare
One Bar at a Time: Why I Believe “Salon Quality” Should Mean Something
I don’t want to tear down the shampoo industry. I want to help change what deserves a place on its shelf.
I was a hairdresser before Cooper Delivered existed. Before the shampoo bars, the off-grid property, the apps, the books and the manufacturing dream, there were years spent behind the salon chair.
And once I started looking at haircare through the lens of sustainability, I began seeing something I could no longer unsee.
Not necessarily what was inside the shampoo bottle.
The bottle itself.
There are two words everywhere in haircare
Salon quality.
They appear on bottles.
They appear on shampoo bars.
They appear across advertising, websites and social media.
And I think those words should mean something.
That doesn’t mean you need to be a hairdresser to build a brilliant haircare business.
Absolutely not.
Some businesses are built by founders who surround themselves with formulators, chemists, hairdressers and people with expertise completely different from their own.
That’s how strong businesses are built.
I’m simply very clear about where my perspective comes from.
Before I became the founder of Cooper Delivered, I was standing behind the chair.
The hairdresser came before the product.
I learnt the marketing language from inside the salon
Hairdressing wasn’t only learning how to cut, colour, style and care for hair.
Products were part of the job.
We learnt professional ranges.
We learnt what different products were intended to do.
We learnt how to recommend shampoo and conditioner according to the person sitting in our chair.
And yes, we learnt how to sell haircare.
We heard the language.
Hydration.
Repair.
Professional.
Salon.
Strength.
Shine.
Colour protection.
We learnt how those words were communicated to customers and how products were positioned on the salon shelf.
Now I’m on the other side of that conversation.
I’m building the product.
Writing the website.
Creating the marketing.
Educating the customer.
And perhaps that’s exactly why I’m cautious about using a phrase such as salon quality simply because it sounds powerful.
For Cooper Delivered, the claim has to be connected to something real.
Years of touching real hair.
Real clients.
Real consultations.
Real mistakes.
Real results.
There are genuinely brilliant bottled shampoos
This is where my position may surprise people.
I don’t need to tell you that every bottled shampoo is terrible for Cooper Delivered to have a reason to exist.
It isn’t true.
I’ve worked with excellent professional haircare throughout my career.
I’ve watched beautiful products perform beautifully on hair.
There are incredibly knowledgeable people working throughout the professional hair industry.
My issue was never simply:
“The shampoo inside the bottle is bad.”
What changed for me was something much simpler.
I finally started noticing the vessel.
Once I saw the bottles, I couldn’t unsee them
For years they were simply part of the scenery.
Shampoo bottles.
Conditioner bottles.
Treatments.
Styling products.
Retail shelves lined with plastic.
When you’re surrounded by something every working day, eventually it becomes invisible.
Then I began learning more about sustainability.
Suddenly, I walked into the same world and saw it differently.
Plastic.
Plastic.
Plastic.
Everywhere.
Not because the professional knowledge behind those products had suddenly disappeared.
Not because every formula had somehow become terrible overnight.
I had simply started questioning why great haircare had become so inseparable from disposable packaging.
And once you genuinely notice something like that, it’s difficult to go backwards.
You can try not to see it.
But you already have.
I don’t want to destroy the shelf
I spent years looking at salon shelves filled with different brands.
Different formulas.
Different philosophies.
Different strengths.
They didn’t all have to disappear for one brand to succeed.
Competition can be healthy.
It can force businesses to formulate better.
Educate better.
Innovate.
Question what they’ve always done.
So I’ve never looked at Cooper Delivered and thought:
“We need to destroy every shampoo bottle.”
I’ve thought:
“What happens if we put another serious choice beside it?”
That’s the shelf I want to change.
Being a shampoo bar isn’t enough
This matters too.
I don’t believe a product becomes professional simply because it’s solid.
Being sustainable doesn’t automatically make something salon quality.
Beautiful branding doesn’t automatically make something salon quality.
And being good at marketing certainly doesn’t remove the responsibility for the product itself to perform.
If shampoo bars are going to earn a serious place within professional haircare, they should be judged properly.
- How does the product cleanse?
- How does the scalp feel afterwards?
- How does the hair feel?
- What ingredients are being used?
- What hair type is it suited to?
- How should it actually be used?
- How long does it last?
- What happens to the packaging when the product is finished?
Those are the conversations I want to have.
Not:
“Shampoo bars are better simply because they’re bars.”
They still have to earn your trust.
You can explore the ingredients used across our current range through the Cooper Delivered Ingredients Library.
So what does “salon quality” mean when I say it?
For me, it isn’t a decoration.
It means the business is being built through the eyes of someone who spent years working with hair.
When I talk about shampooing the scalp rather than unnecessarily scrubbing your ends, that comes from hairdressing.
When I talk about conditioner placement, porosity, buildup, colour, heat, breakage or why two people may need completely different routines, that comes from hairdressing.
When I tell you more product isn’t always the answer, that’s because I’ve watched what happens behind the chair.
And when I don’t know something?
I would rather investigate it than pretend.
That’s why Hair Lab has become such an important part of Cooper Delivered.
The product matters.
But understanding your hair matters too.
Then our life changed as well
There is another part of the Cooper Delivered story that I think matters when we talk about sustainability.
My husband and I left city life, travelled with our dogs and eventually settled on rural land in Western Australia.
We began building an off-grid life.
And suddenly sustainability stopped being something I could talk about only through packaging.
It became physical.
You notice water when you have to manage it.
You notice electricity when the winter sun isn’t giving the solar system what you hoped for.
You notice rubbish when it doesn’t magically disappear from your world.
You notice what comes onto the property.
What can be reused.
What can be repaired.
What grows.
What gets thrown away.
It doesn’t make us perfectly sustainable people.
Far from it.
We still grocery shop.
Plastic still enters our home.
Sometimes the most sustainable option isn’t affordable, accessible or practical.
But if Cooper Delivered says we’re trying to do something differently, I want you to be able to look behind the marketing and see us physically trying to live it.
Sustainability doesn’t need another perfect brand
I don’t think sustainability should be marketed as an purity test.
Use what you already own.
Finish the bottle sitting in your shower.
Reuse what you can.
Make another choice when the opportunity appears.
The goal doesn’t need to be waking up tomorrow with a perfectly plastic-free house.
Our house certainly isn’t.
The point is that once we know more, we can begin questioning what comes next.
One bottle you don’t need.
One thing you repair.
One product you refill.
One bar you try.
Small changes make big ripples.
Why we’re working towards manufacturing in regional Western Australia
This is where the dream becomes much bigger than replacing a shampoo bottle.
Cooper Delivered does not currently manufacture its shampoo bars in Western Australia.
I want to be completely transparent about that.
Our long-term goal is to build towards manufacturing here in regional WA.
Not because putting up a shed suddenly makes a business sustainable.
Because it gives us an opportunity to rethink more of the system.
What ingredients can eventually be sourced closer to home?
How can production be powered?
How much packaging do we actually need?
Can manufacturing create regional employment?
Can a facility eventually provide opportunities beyond our own company?
Can professional solid haircare be produced from a regional Australian town and still compete on a national shelf?
Those are the questions behind the manufacturing dream.
We aren’t standing inside that finished facility yet.
We’re working towards it.
And I think there’s something far more authentic about inviting people to watch us build it than pretending we’ve already arrived.
You can read more about that broader direction inside Sustainable HQ.
We weren’t supposed to still be living in the caravan
This wasn’t exactly the timeline.
When we pictured building our life on the land, we certainly didn’t imagine we’d still be in the caravan at this stage.
But time moves incredibly quickly.
Goals that once looked simple on paper don’t always happen when you expect.
Businesses take longer to grow.
Money needs to go somewhere else.
Priorities change.
Something breaks.
Another idea starts working.
An opportunity appears that wasn’t in the original plan.
And before you know it, the date you once gave yourself has quietly passed.
So here we are.
Still in the caravan.
Still building.
Still figuring it out.
Still moving forward one bar at a time.
The humble little shampoo bar that makes our world go round
Sometimes I look at one Cooper Delivered shampoo bar and think about the ridiculous number of jobs we’ve given it.
First and foremost, it has to wash someone’s hair properly.
That’s non-negotiable.
But when somebody chooses that bar, the sale keeps much more moving behind the scenes.
It helps us continue building Cooper Delivered.
It helps us work towards the long-term manufacturing dream.
It helps grow Nana’s Quest, our online marketplace for handmade and handcrafted goods.
It helps fund the ideas we experiment with.
The apps we build.
The books we write.
The products we test.
The things that work.
And the ideas that sometimes spectacularly don’t.
And yes…
Those humble little bars are also helping us work towards building our home.
Wash hair.
Reduce another bottle.
Grow a business.
Help another business grow.
Build technology.
Write books.
Work towards manufacturing.
Eventually help put a roof over our heads.
That little shampoo bar really does make the world go round.
Well…
At least our little world.
The bigger dream isn’t only shampoo
If we eventually reach the point of manufacturing Cooper Delivered products here, I want the impact to stretch further than simply producing more stock.
The dream includes Australian manufacturing.
Regional skills.
Employment.
Innovation.
Education.
Lower-waste systems.
And proving that interesting businesses don’t have to be built only in major cities.
That won’t happen tomorrow.
Perhaps it won’t happen exactly how we currently imagine it either.
We’ve already learnt enough about life to know plans evolve.
But that’s the direction we’re walking towards.
I don’t want to win because somebody else loses
This is probably the most important distinction in this whole article.
I don’t want Cooper Delivered to earn its place because another brand is torn down.
I want us to earn it.
Through our products.
Through hairdresser education.
Through transparency.
Through the way we build the business.
Through our willingness to say where we’re actually at rather than where we’d like people to believe we are.
There is room for incredible bottled haircare.
There is room for incredible solid haircare.
There is room for founders who aren’t hairdressers.
There is room for chemists.
Formulators.
Salons.
Independent brands.
Major companies.
But if we’re going to use words such as professional, sustainable and salon quality, I think we should be willing to explain what sits behind them.
For Cooper Delivered, that’s what I’m trying to do.
So yes, I want to change the shelf
Maybe more than I used to admit.
I’d love to walk into professional salons one day and see far less disposable plastic.
I’d love to see beautiful solid haircare sitting confidently alongside the industry’s established names.
Not hidden away as the quirky eco alternative.
Not given a free pass because it’s sustainable.
Judged as haircare.
Does it perform?
Does the hairdresser understand it?
Does the customer understand it?
Does it earn its place?
And at the same time, I’d love the products already dominating those shelves to keep asking what they can improve too.
Because perhaps the future isn’t one side defeating the other.
Perhaps it’s everybody being pushed to do better.
Better haircare.
Better education.
Better packaging.
Better choices.
One bar at a time
We’re not standing inside a finished manufacturing facility telling the world we’ve solved sustainable haircare.
We’re on rural land in Western Australia.
Still living in a caravan.
Building Cooper Delivered.
Growing Nana’s Quest.
Creating apps.
Writing books.
Working towards our home.
And dreaming about what Australian solid haircare manufacturing could eventually become.
I don’t want to fight the shampoo industry.
I want Cooper Delivered to earn its place within it.
Then I want to see what happens when the shelf itself starts changing.
One choice.
One customer.
One shampoo bar at a time.
Make It Ritual.