Hernan Prada Hair

Overview

A year and a half of content for an eco-luxe salon group in Westchester. Photography and reels shot in the salons, generated imagery between shoots, all of it working inside a visual language the owner had already set.

What they're about

Every treatment is plant-based, with no harsh chemicals anywhere in the service. The salons are Green Circle certified and run close to zero waste: foils, colour tubes and clippings are all recovered, and the hair itself goes into booms that soak up oil spills. Almost none of that is visible from a chair. You can photograph a finish, not a supply chain. So the work went the other way, into the process and the artistry, the parts of an appointment most people never get to watch.

What I did

I was in the salons constantly, shooting clients mid-appointment, the rooms, the light on the day, and cutting reels from the same visits, with the stylists sending me footage in between. The typeface and the all-lowercase rule were the owner's, inherited and not up for debate. Most of the craft was building a system that held inside them.

The camera was part of the service

Being visibly there with a camera did work of its own. A client whose appointment is worth filming starts to feel the appointment is worth more. The shoot wasn't only production. It became part of what people were paying for.

Generative imagery, in 2022

This was 2022, when the first generative image tools had only just arrived, and I put them straight onto live client work. That is roughly how I have handled every new tool since. The images were never meant to pass as photographs. They were the one place both halves of the service could share a frame: the plant ingredients that go into a treatment, and the hair they produce.

Where it ran

• The newsletter

  I set the voice first, how the brand sounds and what it never says, then drafted against it and edited every line by hand. The generated imagery carried the header of each send.

• Social, between shoots

  The same imagery ran as posts on the weeks there was no shoot, so the feed kept moving without padding it out with stock.

• What actually worked

  Generated hair with real botanical elements around it. Not a photograph and not pretending to be one, and closer to how the salon feels than stock ever got.

Result

Engagement over the period rose about 30%. The more useful outcome was a voice, a library of images and a set of reels the salons could keep using after I'd gone.