Kadi Lee
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Kadi Lee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And Miss Lindsay took money that she had saved and she gave it to me for my train fare to go to New York City and enroll in beauty school.
So I started a beauty school in New York and I was at Aveda. And the minute I started, I just knew I was where I should be. It felt like home. It felt completely natural. I could do it with my eyes closed.
At that point, not entrepreneurial. There was a job fair and all the top salons came to recruit. And one of the salons was Frederick Fakai, which at the time in, you know, early 2000s was the salon. And I remember being like, oh, great. Amazing. I'll just be a colorist at Fakai. Yeah.
You know, not really realizing that they'll hire anyone to be an assistant or to shampoo, but like you're not a colorist right away. Like, you don't, I think about what I knew back then, which was absolutely nothing about color and like the gall that I had to like be like, yeah, I'm going to be a colorist. And the first day showing up and them handing me my shampoo apron. Yeah.
And like, you're making your like $4 an hour. But for color, it was, you know, I always painted. I love art. And it always felt like, okay, this is a canvas. And it felt really freeing to me. And I just, I loved every bit of it. And not ever thinking that there would be a roadblock because I was Black, because there weren't any Black colorists. But it never even crossed my mind.
that it would be an issue. When did it start to cross your mind then? When I showed up at Frederick Fakai and saw that there were no Black people that were actually colorists there. There were a couple of Black assistants. And I was like, well, does anyone ever get promoted to be a colorist? And they were like, maybe.
Then you start really doing some research in the industry and you're like, it actually just doesn't exist anymore. but I don't know if like I was going through life naively. I just never think until this day, I still think that anything is off limits for me. Like that's what I feel like doing. Great. I'm going to do it. And I knew obviously that I had the artistic ability.
I knew that I had the intelligence, but when you realize and get into the real world that like, there is no one else that looks like you, you're like, huh? Did it ever create any anxiety for you, though? Yeah, that anxiety was there, but I had such wonderful mentors. You know, the color director, Constance Hartnett, her and I really... Yeah, we bonded and...
I think she never saw, you know, me as like a Black colorist. I was just like her amazing assistant, you know, who showed up every day, never missed a day of work and had the talent. So she was appalled when I told her I wanted to transfer to California. Because in her mind, New York was just it. Her clients were just the most sophisticated women on the planet.
We're talking like Nan Kempner and Sigourney Weaver and Meryl and all these women that I'm learning literally how to do color corrections on. And I just one day was like, I'm cold. And I want to live in sunny California. And Frederica, I had like an outpost there. And I was like, to Cali I go. I love that you were just like, I'm cold.
Well, first, I was working with Serge, our mutual friend. Yes. And when his LA outpost closed, I found myself wanting to... only work, if I couldn't find anyone as elegant as Serge, then I had to only work for myself.
Yeah. And the answer was there wasn't anyone as elegant as Serge. And as the time was ticking by, it just became clearer that there was a need for it. There was a huge white space in just how people approached the salon experience and how they had become something that was honestly untenable for me to work in.
Too big, too loud. I don't know. I don't know if you find the older you get. I just need quiet. I need peace and quiet. Peace and quiet does not really equate to a salon environment. So we started with...
that as our driver of how could we create a physical space that feels good when you're in it, that actually, you know, regulates your nervous system instead of having you like be completely hopped up on overdrive when you're walking out. Could the music be better? Could the just approach to the business be better? And that's where we started from. And I think we really just hit it on the nail.
When we opened Highbrow Hippie, I can like confidently say there was nothing like it in the country.
Yeah. I mean, Micah and I were chatting one day and we're like, what would it be? And she had a boyfriend who used to call her a bourgeois bohemian. And then we were like, people will never know how to spell that. They'll butcher it. And then I was like, I love the name Highbrow. And then literally at the same time, we both like screamed out Highbrow Hippie. Hippie.
And it's just, we've had the name for so long. Same thing, kept it under wraps. Like it felt like this like big secret that we had that like we just knew was going to be our future. And we're talking 2009, 2008. Oh my gosh. Yeah. But you knew.
Yeah, we always saw Highbrow Hippie as like this multi-dimensional thing. I mean, we never put like any sort of box around what Highbrow Hippie could be. So when the brick and mortar was built, it really was just supposed to be the landing spot for the community because people often launch a product and then try to have the community come to them.
We were like, we've got this like goldmine of women who are just like, the best women on the planet and who have all built incredible businesses or run incredible businesses or are running or are starting or it's just this collective power of a lot of positivity, but really the record speaks for itself. You know, we have Lila Becker who founded and built Mother Denim.
Yes, I feel really lucky. So we knew that we could create any sort of product because we had this community already. And when it was time to create the product, we took the downtime that kind of came with some of the pandemic, and we sent out a survey to our clients. And it was like, what products are you using? Hair, skin, body. What kind of services do you get?
Showing 41–60 of 91 · page 3 of 5
← Previous
Next →