A Personalised Hair Hub for Dream Regimes!

By Louise May

Zorba Hair was established in 1965 by Peter Kotis, who brought to the business his expertise as a European hairstylist. Zorba has been a great influence in the Australian hairdressing industry ever since with a proud history of providing professional hair services for the entire family.

Serving Carindale locals since 1979, Zorba Hair is one of the original tenants of Carindale Shopping Centre in Brisbane. Owner-founder Peter Kotis developed Zorba Hair as a salon for the whole family, delivering all your haircut, style and care needs. Since then, Peter’s daughters Anna and Kaliopi have taken the lead in the family business, building upon its legacy with vast training and experience with the best professional hair care products on the market. The result? GLAM BOX! Solutions for every hair goal, type and budget.

Featuring a deluxe range of products hand-picked for performance and offering the same caring, personalised and diagnostic advice that you’d expect from visiting a family salon. Glam Box exists to eliminate the need to visit a salon, blindly follow a recommendation or even trawl through Google for one hundred and eightyfive years.

With Glam Box Shop, clients can shop by hair type or goal, alternatively fill in a quick quiz and be matched with perfect products. Or book a complimentary virtual hair care consult for a live online consultation video call with a member of Glam Box’s caring team.

Glam Box makes discovering your dream regime easier than ever before, rinsing worries away with personalised solutions, from wherever you happen to be.

Hair Biz Editor chats with Anna about the family business and how Glam Box was born.

To help us get to know you a little more, would you share a little about your family.

Born and bred in Brisbane- we have been brought up to be very loyal and stable. We are a no-fluff kind of family; we make the best out of every situation and have been taught to work hard to achieve our goals

Can you tell us about your career paths in the industry and where did it all begin for you and your sister?

We have both lived/worked in the Salon all of our life, it’s all we’ve lived and breathed so it was inevitable that we would both be a part of it. We’ve both completed our Business, Commerce and Marketing Degrees at University and used our knowledge and skill to alter the typical salon model.

What inspired the creation of Glam Box?

Glam Box was inspired by our beautiful clients at Zorba. Every day we help them create the perfect regime for their hair. Zorba is so much more than an average salon because we have access to such a huge variety of professional brands and, over the 40 years we have been in business, we have tried and tested every single one of them.

Our depth of knowledge comes from experience and that’s something our clients really trust and appreciate. We know professional haircare inside out! It’s our passion and we are really good at it. Our belief is that a good hairdresser makes a client look good for a day, but a great hairdresser (and retailer) keeps their client looking amazing until their next salon visit! Problem was that our Carindale location only has so many clients that we can reach.

Glam Box was born out of the desire to take our knowledge and brand affiliation to a wider audience nationally. We wanted to infuse our salon ethos into a professional, hairdresser-driven online platform. Glam Box is absolutely unique in the way that we focus on our visitors and their hair. The site is designed to create the most personal interaction with our clients, even from thousands of kilometres away.

We want our customers to achieve their ultimate hair goals and know that we are always here for them whenever they may need a little hair care advice. We don’t just sell hair care, we live it.

Anna and Kaliopi with father Peter

What are your roles with Glam Box, do you have separate areas you focus on?

Kaliopi’s primary focus is at Zorba and mine is at Glam Box, but we are a family business (Father, daughters, Son in laws, brother in laws-you name it!) and we all do everything we need to get the job done! Everyone helps everyone and there are no job descriptions in sight!

What challenges have you faced along the way? how have you overcome them?

There have been many challenges that have met us along the way. We knew the site we were trying to create was innovative and intricate, but the online world is truly something else- like speaking a foreign language. We have had to learn a whole new industry within our industry and compete with so many sites who are choosing to harm our professional industry with discounting and price slashing. This has never been what we stand for.

We are a salon group first and foremost and would never create a business that would hurt businesses like ours, or compromise the brands that we recommend and believe in. Being competitive whilst doing the right thing can be difficult, but we value add, we create promotions and incentives to thrill our consumers instead of harming our industry and what we stand for.

Our other largest hurdle we had to overcome was the brands we were affiliated with. Although our relationships stem back as far as 43 years, Glam Box was a new entity and like any new business we had to prove ourselves. This was definitely a difficulty we hadn’t anticipated.

What has been your greatest lesson or piece of advice along your business journey?

That nothing worth achieving is easy (or fast) I feel like so many people are in it for the quick dollar, for the today. Every decision made should be for the future dollar, concentrate on caring about every client, sincerely and genuinely and the money will come. My favourite quote is if you always do what you’ve always done then you’ll always get what you’ve always got.

What’s on the agenda for the future?

So many new and exciting things headed for Glam Box! New brands, new innovations and new ideas headed this way... watch this space!