Jamie Hibble, Founder of iRange™   

While growing up, my older sister was an apprentice in an up-market City salon so I guess that's where my fascination with the Hairdressing Industry began. She later opened a groovy little salon on the beach front and I spent a lot of time in her salon before moving into a sales and marketing role with a high profile Hair and Beauty company.

The company was an icon in the International salon arena and they single handily pioneered the first effective reconstructive products in the Industry. I met many high profile hairdressers and serviced a broad cross section of salons during this time and I enjoyed providing real follow up service to my clients.

I was then approached with the opportunity to pioneer a boutique, name brand International Hair Care product, which at the time was new to the Australian market. The company was a forerunner in developing new and exciting products, bringing new textures to the industry and developing first of a kind styling products, which literally blew the industry away.

I mean before that, for the main, the industry had a bit of gummy gel, some lacquer hairspray and a bit of tacky mousse to be creative with. In this time I became really passionate about good quality products and how they perform on hair.
 
After; successfully penetrating this brand into the market, elevating the product name in the minds of both Hairdressers and consumers, making it synonymous with quality and aligned with high profile salons, it was time for change.

Around this time there was an influx of large multinational, chemical and supermarket companies clamouring to buy up salon-only brands, in order to gain market share. Some of these giants were bidding three to one above the real value of the company’s worth, to outbid their rivals. The result was these once salon-only product companies lost their heart and soul, including their salon-only ethos.

It was sad for the Industry in one way, however it was a sign of the times and it enabled me to see the answer was not just another product range, because I had done that before. At first, I actually wasn’t sure what to do or where to go from there, however after a couple of false starts a light went off in my head. I began looking outside of the box, stepping away and viewing the industry from a different platform for the soul purpose of gaining a better perspective, in order to see if there was a need not being filled.

I began helping salons with their print media and marketing initiatives and during this time I saw, for the main, no one was helping salon owners to market and promote their own salon name to consumers. I then had the good fortune of meeting a very talented industry specialist who was passionate and dedicated to creating natural Hair Care. I knew our meeting was not by chance and was one of those moments that was meant to be, or was what I call, ‘a click’.

I knew most product companies were more interested in selling salon owners just another flowery, well dressed-up pack, or giving them a new poster or some other meaningless promotion or incentive as if it was the solution to the salons problems, when really they made no real difference to the salons overall business. With this in mind I became enthused about creating a very stylish range of professional Hair care products, with each individual product having the salons own name printed on the bottle to act as a powerful advertising tool to promote and market salons.

No one was doing it; or if they were they weren’t doing it well, so I knew if I could help salon owners to brand and promote their own name, it would be a win-win situation. Of course my commitment was to use natural, organic ingredients and my objective was to create a boutique, up-market hair care range to act as a tool to equip the professional hairdresser with a collection of cleansing, conditioning, treatments and extra ordinary styling products.

To get the venture moving I knew I would need some really talented people around me, for I had personally learnt the hard way, that you can't do things in life on your own. I went looking for associates whom I could work in collaboration with, who knew and understood the Hairdressing, Beauty and Fashion industry and were good in their particular field.

One cold winters night while going for a walk, the name iRange™ literally popped into my head while walking through this thick mist, which had blanketed the whole street. Over the years Generation X and Generation Y had come and gone and it dawned on me, this current generation is the information generation. So iRange™became the name to indentify the brand and I’m convinced this idea was divinely given because miraculously the names for each individual product literally came to me in an instant.

The following day was a Saturday and ironically or strangly, as if to confirm this was the direction I was to head in, a bright light in the perfect shape of the letter i appeared on my wall, while I was sitting at my table having breakfast. I mean I was quite overwhelmed and in awe and the first thing I tried to do, was rationalise it as the morning sun just pearing through the edge of my curtains. What ever it was it was in the shape of the letter i so I took a photo of it and deemed it to be divine confirmation that I was meant to make iRange™a reality. I mean after all the Hairdressing industry is all about creating, sometimes the seemingly impossible.

After that I decided ‘I’d rather attempt to do sometime great, and fail, than attempt to do nothing, and succeed’. So after the right people were in place a think-tank was created where we could pool our ideas together. We then fused those idea’s for the soul purpose of providing unique, up-market, stylish hair care products to service the needs of salons and their customers. After the product formulations were perfected iRange™was birthed and I am now proud to work with the some of the most competent bio chemists and industry professionals the country has to offer.

Collectively the team has worked in the product formulation and professional hair and beauty arena, for copious amount of years. iRange™is manufactured in a state of the art facility, where the formulation of each individual product is meticulously overseen, then utilized on selected models in a real educational and salon environment, before being chronicled; after all, a good product has to perform on hair and deliver real results.

iRange™ is more than just a product; all things being considered iRange™could have been called, ‘your range’, because each individual product has the salons name printed on the bottle. In hindsight iRange™began as an idea to help salon owners to market and promote their own salon, using a range of boutique products which act as an extension of the hairdressers arm and assists the professional stylist to create the looks and styles they desire. That’s it in a nut shell, it’s really is that simple; were more than a product company, we have a cause!