From Gent's Barbershop to Gender-Free Hairdressing Space

Murray McRae talks about the evolution of his company, Stag Barber, and its journey from gent’s barbershop to a gender-free hairdressing space…

What’s the ethos of Stag Barber?

Our ethos is to provide high quality haircuts and colour for everyone in a relaxed, inclusive, fun environment and charge based on hair length and time rather than gender.

What’s your background in hair? How did you become a barber?

I trained at Charlie Miller for nine years where I was given a very high level of training in classic, short hairdressing. After some time I realised I wanted to focus on short hair, so I decided to branch out and open my own shop.

When was Stag Barber set up what’s the story behind it?

Stag was set up in 2014, initially because I wanted to focus on short hair and spend more time with each client. It was a classic barbershop at the time, wood panelled and with navy blue and red tones. The idea was to work on my own and gradually take on an additional one or two barbers to cut men’s hair. However, I found that a range of folk wanted to come to the barbershop including women, and non-binary and transitioning clients. I realised that there was no good reason to turn anyone away, and so started to question the idea of a classic “gents” barbershop and whether that was in line with my values. With input from my clients, I decided to make Stag a gender-free hairdressers, where anyone can come and get a great cut and be charged on the length of their hair, and the time the service takes, not their gender. Since then it’s transformed into the wonderful yellow butterfly that it is today, we cut and colour a wide and varied range of clients together with a brilliant, talented and diverse team.

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We heard that you’ve done training to become a gender-free space, when was that and what did it teach you?

We had our team undertake the Hair Has No Gender Training in May 2022. The training was invaluable in teaching our team about the importance of people’s identity and how they use their hair to express that, and the ways in which we can support them as hair professionals. A gender-affirming haircut is a really powerful thing and the training left our team feeling really empowered. We also learnt lots of information such as the steps of transition, useful and clear explanations of terminology and language and the gender, sex and identity spectrum. We were also given lots of practical tips on how to be inclusive such as reaching out to LGBTQIA groups/charities, offering work experience to out of work trans teens, and auditing our consultation and marketing practices.

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What changes have you made since then?

The training helped us solidify a lot of our practices and after completing audits of our booking, consultation and marketing we realised that we already apply a lot of the recommendations. We were able to work on a few areas though and a couple of the changes were made. We now have pronoun badges for our staff to wear, and offer a range of options in the staff room for people to choose how they identify each day. Any new staff that joins us now receives an info pack from Keri [the founder of Hair Has no Gender] as part of their onboarding before they begin dealing with clients. We also included a new section in the staff handbook about pronouns and being gender aware. This section is specifically sent in the onboarding email so it doesn’t get lost deep in the handbook, and we talk through all the actions we take to be inclusive with the new staff member on their first day.