Wella’s reputation and credibility in the world of hair fashion is heavily influenced by endorsement and buy-in from the world’s leading hair artists. To encourage this, Wella brings its Top Artists together for an annual Symposium, providing professional inspiration and challenging them with new ways of approaching their work.

This audience of Top Artists are all creative, small business owners. They’re at the top of their industry, and they’ve got there by by spending the last 20 years on their feet, on the shop floor. This means many felt threatened and out-of-touch with the profound changes in business culture and digitally-led consumer expectations of the last decade. We saw an opportunity to reframe this change as a positive, and in doing so, show Wella as a revitalized brand that could be their anchor in this changing world.

Throughout the course of Day One - which was centred on understanding the key tenets of disruption in a modern world, the host was joined by a diverse range of inspiring speakers that included Neil Harbisson, a self-described ‘cyborg artist’ who has augmented his own senses with technology.

On Day Two - which was more focused on understanding and interpreting disruption in the context of Wella - we give their Top Artists a hands-on look at the trends, products and initiatives built for the new beauty landscape by Wella. Creative workshops broke up the theoretical sessions, allowing our crowd of kinetic thinkers to work with and understand what they’d learned in a practical, physical setting.