Still shining ten years on

Shining on: Stephanie Goj, Carla Octigan and Alessandro Conforti

This year Shine Holistic – Stoke Newington’s one-stop shop for hair, health and beauty – is celebrating its ten-year anniversary.

It boasts an unusual mix of complementary medicine and salon services as Shine’s founder Carla Octigan has juggled various roles over the years – and it seems she would not have it any other way.

Starting with no formal management experience and a lot of good faith, Shine’s founders reflect on how they became a Stoke Newington institution that managed to expand even during the recession.

“We met out of my bad hair day,” says Stephanie, recalling how years ago she called a Highbury Barn salon desperate for a haircut without caring who did it. That day she ended up in Carla’s chair.

They got chatting during her haircut and just a few months later, Carla started retraining under Stephanie as a Shiatsu practitioner.

Carla had no experience running a business, but she was determined to put complementary medicine and hairdressing under one roof.

So when their Stoke Newington Church Street address came up for sale, she went for it, and invited Stephanie to take on the clinic side of the business. “Timing often counts for a lot,” explains Stephanie, who had recently moved in down the road, and was ready for a new challenge alongside a career as a fully self-employed shiatsu practitioner.

When Shine opened in 2003, Stoke Newington was “hungry for a good salon.” More good timing there — locals were knocking at the door to book appointments before the builders had put away their drills. “We were fully booked almost from day one,” says Carla.

Shine’s complementary services treat the body from the inside out – from manicures and facials to osteopathy and acupuncture.

Hairdressing and body work come together under the same umbrella: therapy – so combining them seemed like a no-brainer. “Clients often treat their hairdressers as a therapist, or a sounding board for their problems,” explains Carla.

“I thought that if you put complementary medicine into an environment that people are familiar with, such as a hair salon, it would make the complementary side of things more accessible, less mystical. This was taking complementary medicine and putting it into a really professional, comfortable environment.”

The clinic now boasts upwards of fifty practitioners, all hand-picked by Stephanie. Shine’s ethos is reflected in its staff, many of whom, from receptionists to notoriously nomadic hairdressers, have been with Shine since the beginning.

“We have a head for the business side but we have an equal head for the human side,” says Carla. For Shine, balancing the two is about staying at the top of their game professionally whilst having a bottom line that goes beyond profit-margins – it’s about “accepting the ebb and flow of business, as in life,” says Stephanie.

The people-based business model has been a success, marked most recently by Shine’s newest outpost. Joined by co-owner Alessandro Conforti, Shine on the Green opened on Newington Green just after the recession hit. “It stretched our business,” admits Carla. However, when your company is built around people sustainability is about more than just cash flow, a fact to which Shine Holistic’s decade in business duly attests.

Shine, Church Street
52 Stoke Newington Church Street
N16 0NB
T: 020 7241 5033
T: 020 7249 9671
E: mail@shineholistic.co.uk

Shine, Newington Green
20 Newington Green
N16 9PU
T: 020 7241 2065
T: 020 7812 9306
E: mail@shineholistic.co.uk