Carol Bruguera’s hair art project has conquered the AIPP Awards
“Little Hair Stories” is a series of humorous videos that pay tribute to the hairdressing industry and the salon clients – a video project that has also been recognized at the Hairbrained Video Awards in New York.
Catalan salon brand Carol Bruguera continues to make history worldwide, after winning a new AIPP Award, in the Best Video category, for its artistic project “Little Hair Stories”. With this award, Carol Bruguera has become the only representative of Spanish hairdressing to take the gold in this year’s competition of these prestigious awards given every year by the International Association of the Professional Press.
Discovering ‘Little Hair Stories’…
The winning video at the AIPP awards is a compilation of the whole project, you can watch it here …
The presentation of this coveted award was held on Sunday 26 March at the Expo Beauty Barcelona trade fair, hosted by Mike Vincent, President of the AIPP. Mia Carol, CEO of Carol Bruguera, was invited to the stage to collect the trophy on behalf of the entire team.
As if that wasn’t enough, this award comes on top of two others received for the same project at the Hairbrained Video Awards in New York, in the categories of Best Video of the Year and Best Humorous Video.
“Winning an AIPP or a Hairbrained Video Award represents more than a great effort, something that isn’t usual, but something that has already happened to us and that we thought would never happen again. An award of this level, and worldwide, is like a tattoo that can’t be erased or painted over – imagine two awards in a single year! Right now, we are on cloud nine, living a dream!”, says Mia Carol.
This important recognition once again highlights the great creative talent and unique vision that Carol Bruguera demonstrates in each of the projects they undertake. The result is artistic pieces of great imagination and authenticity, which manage to surprise all over the hairdressing world, and also inside and outside our industry. “We like to think that we are doing our bit to ensure that hairdressing is seen as an art, that being a hairdresser is more than just a profession, that we give add value to our industry”, says Mia.
Mia Carol tells us the ins and outs of this fascinating project and the keys to harvesting a creative mind to come up with great and surprising ideas.
What inspired you to create Little Hair Stories?
“I remember we were three people from different backgrounds: hairdressing, video and communication. We wanted to play by creating video stories with very small elements involving hairdressers and clients. We also wanted to play with macro lenses. Then, we saw several Asian artists who worked excellently with macro photography with miniature figures. And from there we took the leap to try to do the same thing but in video format, always with the focus of our industry”.
What is the process you followed to be able to give shape to such a creative idea?
“Phew! It was a long one. At the same time as we were thinking of stories to tell, we were looking for miniature figures. As we found them, we came up with ideas. We used model railway figures, of which there are thousands. But many of them are out of print and we buy them from remote places, via the internet, all over the world. Some of them were combined with hairdressing tools to elevate our craft. Others with real models, to play with the difference in size. Others with hair… We discarded some of our ideas for technical reasons, because we didn’t get the desired effect. We even discarded many of the finished creations, because they seemed weaker than others. In the end, 33 videos survived, all of them made by Natx Creacions Audiovisuals.”
How do you manage not to run out of creative ideas, and can you give us some tips or tricks?
“There are two key points: have passion and surround yourself with a multidisciplinary and motivated team. How do we do it? You throw away what doesn’t work, start again, throw it away again, pick up part of what you threw away and try to do it differently. Any idea is good, I have ideas that were born many years ago. Some of them have been tried several times and they are still written down; some of them gave rise to others that came to light successfully and others come to light without thinking… The important thing is to keep trying, to believe in your people, to believe in the ideas and to fight until you get it”.