Ali Barber. Photo / Jin Fellet / The Spinoff
Originally published by The Spinoff.
Three teenage barbers in Mt Albert have capitalised on a viral haircut to build businesses on Instagram. Duncan Greive gets a haircut and a lesson in modern business.
“When I first started cutting hair, I messed up my friend really badly,” says Ali. I shiver involuntarily – he has clippers in his hand and is halfway through giving me a fresh lid. “There was no fade, no nothing. It was really horrible.” Ali, whose surname we’re withholding at his mum’s request, sounds truly remorseful. “He was really, really angry. Didn’t talk to me for a few days.”
Ali is a 15-year-old barber, one of a trio who have built brisk and growing businesses cutting a very specific haircut atop the heads of hundreds of teenage boys. My daughter Robyn goes to school with him, and told me about this kid she knew who was cutting hair on Instagram one day. Everything about it sounded awesome. A 15-year-old starting his own business, in charge of everything from payments to equipment to marketing, giving everyone that same “broccoli perm” – so named for its resemblance to the divisive vegetable – that GQ calls “the definitive Zoomer hairstyle”.
I tracked him down, cleared it with his mum and went to his studio, out the back of a Sandringham villa, and had Ali tell me his story while he trimmed me a Gen X broccoli perm. Ali has always been entrepreneurial, according to his mother. It started with selling “random stuff” through Facebook Marketplace, before he moved on to trading cards, sold to friends at school. It wasn’t until he turned 14 that he decided to try cutting hair, after seeing a friend take to it with ease. He picked a classic hairdresser’s pun to trade under: Ali Barber.
It’s now nearly a year on, and the friend who inspired him to start has already moved on. “He gave up, even though he’s way better than me.” Ali started out trimming his dad’s hair and beard, then practised on friends. It started at $5 a cut, then $10, $15 until his current rate of $20. On a really good week, he’ll get through 15-20 cuts. The clientele is young, often younger than him. “A lot of them are Year 7 and 8 from intermediate,” he says. “They turn up at my door with their parents.”
Read more: Broccoli haircuts: Are perms for men on the rise in New Zealand?
According to Ali, the current, ubiquitous Gen Z broccoli haircut blew up because of TikTok and Instagram reels, to the point where almost every boy at Auckland inner-west schools seems to have the same haircut: clippered around the neck and sideburns, blowing out into a shaggy bowl on top. It typically requires wavy or curly hair, but it’s so popular right now that straight-haired kids – including Ali – are getting perms (his was $150, funded by barbering) to achieve the desired volume.
Embarrassingly, it’s also my hairstyle now. I had variations on the same short back and sides for over a decade, before fate intervened. When my previous barber became ill, I let my hair grow out while awaiting news of his health. He’d cut my hair for 15 years, just a fraction of his epic 70-year career barbering in Auckland city.
Young George eventually died, aged 85. I was grief-stricken, and my hair grew longer while I tried to figure out what to do. I saw my wife’s hairdresser, Mel, who was excellent, and tolerant of my request to shape my greying hair into the over-hyped style of the world’s teenage boys.
Ali’s entry point to barbering is fascinating, but far from unique. According to Niq James, chief executive of industry organisation Hair & Barber and owner of Christchurch’s Headspace salon, Ali’s story is increasingly common in the social media era. “There’s no legal requirement to be qualified,” he says, and while he believes there should be, the fact it’s an accessible and inexpensive industry to enter is part of the attraction for some. Men’s hair is also relatively low-stakes. “If it goes wrong, it’s only a month and your hair grows back.”
I kept that in mind when booking a cut, slightly apprehensive, on my 45th birthday. Surely there could be no more authentic broccoli perm than one delivered by a real-life teenager? Young George started his career cutting pensioners’ hair at 15, giving my change in barbers an extra layer of symmetry. It seemed like fate.
Over the 45 minutes he took, Ali painstakingly worked his way around my head, acquiescing to my Gen X desire to keep the fade more conventional than a typical broccoli perm. “I do burst fades, taper fades and some drop fades,” he tells me in a quiet, unassuming voice, which matches his low-key demeanour. I also eschew the fine detail work which most of his clientele actively seek. “Designs and eyebrow slits are big – they’re on trend at the moment,” Ali tells me. There’s a lot of demand for partners’ names, lightning bolts and zig zags.
Ali is one of three barbers in Year 11, all attending Mount Albert Grammar. The other two are known as Ice Cold Cutz and BT Blendz. Ali and BT Blendz have their own home studios, but “Ice Cold Cutz is at a major disadvantage, because he doesn’t have a room”, says Ali. “So when it rains, he can’t cut.” They’re all a similar level of experience, around a year, and charge around $15-20 for a cut. There are often crowds in his studio, a room out behind his parents’ house. “It’s quite a social scene,” says Ali’s mum.
The businesses are all built on the same platform too: Instagram. Ali posts stories and reels of his work as a way of marketing, and has messaged with other barbers with tens of thousands of fans. A barber in Hawaii with 60,000 followers has been mentoring him, giving advice on better equipment, a higher-quality tripod and light, and techniques to “make the lines more crispy”.
Still, it’s the fact there are three barbers in one year which is the foundation for their most effective marketing technique. In reality, they’re good friends – but on Instagram, it looks different. “We make fake beef to get people to go to us,” says Ali. It’s all fairly restrained: posting embarrassing photos of one another, or “dissing each other at the start of a video”. Still, they play the rivalry straight on Instagram. “A lot of people thought it wasn’t manufactured because we did it so well.”
Ali says the beef gets far more interactions than footage of haircuts, which gets it more wide distribution, increasing their follower counts. More followers means more customers, which ultimately allows them to raise prices. Advertising and capitalism in miniature. He views it as the path to his ultimate goal: a private studio, where he can charge $50 for a “hot towel, skin mask, razor beard shaving”.
The path there is not without its complications. “You can get scammed pretty easily,” says Ali. This is typically done through a “fake transfer”, where a customer will steal a haircut by showing him a transfer which looks legit, but is in fact scheduled for the following day. As soon as they leave, they cancel it. It’s happened to him three times so far: one of the hard lessons of any service enterprise.
After 45 minutes, we’re all done. I’m timid, so asked him to leave the top alone, so it’s not radically different. But Ali has done a great job; I’d use him again if it didn’t seem disloyal to Mel. But Ali is not short of customers, and cutting hair is already earning him a decent living. He’s reinvesting some of what he makes – he has recently upgraded his clippers to a shiny gold pair, along with a new ring light and tripod to shoot his clients.
I asked teachers at other schools if barbers were showing up there, but none had heard of any. Ali and his friendly competition are getting locally famous – he cuts the hair of kids from Western Springs as well as MAGS, and multiple local intermediates. The seemingly insatiable appetite for the broccoli cut shows no signs of abating. While it runs hot, Ali Barber is in business.
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