Edit: I originally wrote this post a year and a half ago. Rereading it now, everything in it still holds — if anything, more so. Sharing it as it was first written, unchanged. — Reid
You know that saying, "Good things come to those who wait"? I think about that a lot when I think about how I ended up here.
I've spent my career across the beauty industry — cosmetology school, salon work, product education, and eventually building and running a business inside it. Along the way, I worked with plenty of brands and plenty of employers, and I learned just as much from the ones that didn't work out as the ones that did. Some patterns showed up again and again, and over time I started keeping a mental list of red flags:
- Employees or leadership checked out
- Lack of follow through
- Unclear directives
- Poor and cheap packaging, and quality control that didn't match the price point
- Lack of accountability
- Lack of humility or gratitude
- Lack of communication and disjointed training
Every one of those things costs a business more than it realizes — not just in operations, but in trust, and eventually in retention, both of clients and of the people working for you.
When I first started working with the Elleebana USA team, I was watching for those same red flags out of habit. I kept waiting for one to show up. It didn't. What I found instead was a brand with genuinely thorough manuals, real science behind the formulations rather than marketing dressed up as science, a team structure that actually communicated, and a level of ethics I hadn't consistently seen elsewhere in this industry. Small things stood out too — like the decision to replace sodium bromate with hydrogen peroxide in their lift system, and the development of a vegan Re-Gen product, both choices that cost the brand more to make and weren't strictly necessary from a marketing standpoint. Those are the kinds of decisions a company makes when it actually cares about the outcome, not just the sale.
That's what led me to becoming a Certified Elleebana Trainer, and eventually to building Polymorph Beauty around distributing and teaching this system specifically. Good things really do come to those who wait — and to those willing to hold out for a partner that matches the standard they're trying to hold themselves to.