One glance at the Stephen Marr website and you can’t help but feel that you’re taking a peek inside the lives of the in crowd. Think Gossip Girl without the gossip, and exchange the bratty rich kid vibe with a hip and stylish aesthetic that fashionable New Zealanders do so terribly well. If you scroll down the News page at www.stephenmarr.co.nz you’ll see cool editorial shoots, notes from backstage at NZ Fashion Week, model makeovers and even a global guide to the best bars, eateries, clubs and retailers in cities from Paris to Tokyo by some more coolio correspondent mates such as songstress Bic Runga.There’s no doubt about it, this husband and wife duo just totally get it.

Stephen Marr started hairdressing in 1987 in Hamilton. After working for four years, he left to study and returned to the industry he loved with an arts degree, opening his own salon in 1994. Lucy started her career in Nelson, at the northern end of New Zealand’s south island. She left school in 1988 to pursue hairdressing and moved to Auckland in 1995 to further her career in the metropolis. After winning a multitude of awards including New Zealand Hairdresser of the Year, Hair Expo NZ Hairdresser of the Year, Colourist of the Year, Male Stylist of the Year and many more, Lucy and Stephen consolidated their businesses and expanded their team. They now co-own three Stephen Marr salons, two Lucy & The Powder Rooms and a concept beauty store, The Marr Lab.

Stephen and Lucy complement each other beautifully when it comes to business. His creative drive comes from the desire to always keep things fresh, new and thought provoking, an approach that extends into every area of the business, from communication and client service to multimedia and finding original expressions to attract new generations to the hair industry. She is one of the key creative forces of the company. With a passion for fresh intepretation, Lucy identifies with fashion’s fringe movements, where the emphasis is concept-driven and clever melded with quirky shapes and textures.

Aligning their brand with fashion is something that Lucy and Stephen have been committed to for many years. Without a doubt the most consistently ‘on-the-money’ hair team behind the scenes at New Zealand Fashion Week, (where they’ve worked since 2001), Lucy says that their affiliation with all things fashionable is an important and beneficial aspect of their business.

“For a long time, I felt that the hair industry seemed to be very introspective, producing work that lacked a ready-to-wear feel and was disconnected from the whole,” Lucy explains. “For us, the idea of collaboration with creatives outside the industry and working within multimedia really appealed and held more value from our clients’ perspective.”

Stephen and Lucy have long-standing relationships with many of New Zealand’s edgiest fashion brands, including Nom*d, Cybele, Salasai, Adrian Hailwood, Deadly Ponies, Juliette Hogan and Lonely Hearts. The country’s most high profile designer, Karen Walker, is a close friend and recently became a business partner with the duo in The Department Store, along with fashionista Dan Gosling from Stolen Girlfriends Club and Black Box. A modern take on the traditional collective style of retailing, the Takapuna-based TDS is reminiscent of Colette in Paris, Dover St Market in London and 10 Corso Como in Milan. It offers three floors of modern luxury; a highly curated design store where one can experience the very best from the worlds of beauty, art, fashion and interiors.

High fashion is all well and good, but being able to convert trends from couture to user-friendly is vital for a salon’s success. Lucy understands this only too well, hence is very proactive from a marketing perspective in using fashion imagery to promote the Stephen Marr brand – something that she says is highly effective for their business.

“We are very much about translating fashion onto the salon floor for our clients and using it for training and education purposes as well,” says Lucy. “You could say it is very central to our core.

“We’ve been fortunate to work with some amazing people on the fashion front and on some shows, when all the elements come together incredibly, the energy is electric. “If things go wrong, it just enhances the creative process,” she smiles.Outside fashion, Lucy and Stephen work closely with the film and music industries and use these associated media to enhance the parameters of their own business in a unique and refreshing way.“We share our office space with a really progressive film and design studio who are producing some of the most exciting music videos at the moment,” Lucy adds. “We are starting to head into doing more moving images for our creative work too, which seems to appeal to our clients.”

Exploring new frontiers provides the Marr duo with endless creative challenges and they enjoy the process immensely, tackling it head on. Just recently they launched their own hair and body range – Sans, New Generation Ceuticals. The collection is very anchored in science and sustainability, as the products utilise cosmecutical technology, yet are completely free of any synthetics and parabens.

Sans is available at their own beauty business, Lucy & The Powder Room, as well as at The ‘Marr Lab’, the pair’s recently established retail arm run by Lucy, which also focuses on toxic-free products.

“As well as working with some of New Zealand’s top scientists,” Lucy says, “I collaborated with an extraordinary woman; a bio-tech scientist who researches cancer proteins for breast cancer. She guided me through the process to create what is now called Sans (sustainable and natural skincare), doing independent testing and lab cultures. Vitamin A is a key feature of the brand, formulated at potent levels to give incredible reparative, rejuvenative and healing results.”

Environmental preservation and sustainability is something that’s not just heralded within the new skincare range, but something that Stephen and Lucy practice as well as preach. They support brands within their businesses that reflect similar values when it comes to commitment to environmental sustainability, including Environ, O&M, kevin.murphy, MOP, American Crew, Sebastian, ID Bare Minerals and Becca.

Stephen and Lucy also incorporate eco-practices within their company and encourage others to follow suit. Such procedures are evident in all areas, from chemical waste disposal (‘we have our tint tubes, foil and developer bottles taken away by a specialist company to render inert and recycle’); marketing (‘we use stock made from sustainable sources and vegetable-based printer inks’); cleaning (‘all products are environmentally-friendly and replenished by refill’); retail bags (‘we use natural fibre calico bags that have a longer life cycle than energy intensive paper bags’); energy (‘we use Meridian, a 100% New Zealand owned clean energy company that bases its energy on renewable resources’); organic hair colour (‘we have a non-toxic vegetable-based option that is gentle on skin as well as the environment’) and café (‘we use organic fair trade coffee and hot chocolate, so growers are paid at a rate that covers production and provides funds for community services). They also have a list of environmental tips on their website that we can all use to assist with environmental sustainability and the conservation of energy.

Cool, fashionable and green – what an inspiring combination! Apparently trying to enjoy the moment, learning French and chilling out a bit more are three things Lucy and Stephen are aspiring to this year. No doubt any down time will result in some more innovations at Camp Marr.