Meet the Worthing hairdresser who's been in business for 50 years

Now a prominent Worthing businessman, Richard said he came from humble beginnings and is proud of his five decades of success in our town.

To celebrate his milestone half-century in the Royal Arcade, of which he is now the landlord, he and his team held a small party at the salon on Friday.

Richard said: “I’m not well known, it’s just the name over the shop that people know but I am proud of that legacy. The industry is tough now, but we are still here and I hope that’s testament to the experience we offer.

"People don’t just come to us for a haircut, they come for the luxury and the experience.”

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Despite having stopped hairdressing 20 years ago, Richard has remained at the helm of the business he started from one room on the first floor of the Royal Arcade in 1974.

Then, the rented room was above a tobacconist and Richard worked long days in the salon with just one member of staff to do shampooing.

When the tobacconist moved out, he took up the lease on the downstairs property, before buying the freehold a few years later.

Then, the property next door came up for sale and he bought that, too, and then expanded again when the property next door to that became available.

Over the years, he said there had been massive changes in the industry, the toughest of which was Covid, when they could not see clients at all.

But he said his determination to succeed, the salon’s loyal customer base and a team of long-standing staff members had kept the business thriving over the years.

He added: “The biggest difference now from when I first started is that appointments used to be one every 15 minutes. You used to put the rollers in one client, stick them under the dryer, move onto the next one, stick the rollers in, under the dryer, then again, then you’d take the first one out and comb it out and then put another one under.

“Because everyone had a shampoo and set it was very much like a factory line.

“It didn’t take long before you had all these customers that you knew really well because they came every week. Now, you need a lot of customers as they might only come every few months, that’s a real difference.”

At the age of 74, Richard is still ambitious for the business. In a few weeks’ time, his new beauty salon will open in the unit next to the current salon in the Royal Arcade. The whole run of shops will be knocked through so they become one huge unit. He currently has beauty rooms on the top floor of Richard John, but this new salon will become a bespoke base for the beauty side of his brand, with six treatment rooms, additional staff and more offerings, including a nail bar and spray tanning.

“I’m very excited about the opening, it’s going to look very good,” he said of the expansion. It comes after he made the ‘very difficult’ decision to close his other hair salon, Centrestage, just over the road in South Street, having run it for more than 30 years.

All the staff from there will move into the Richard John salon and he hopes to find a new tenant for the South Street property, which he also owns.

He also still runs The Academy by Richard John – a training facility in Rowlands Road which helps to train around a dozen or so up-and-coming stylists each year. They take part in a two-year training apprenticeship, including working in salons across Worthing, and gain a City & Guilds qualification at the end of it – meaning even stylists who don’t work in Richard’s own salon have quite likely taken part in his training programme.

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At its peak, the Richard John salon employed about 65 members of staff. It still has almost 50 employees on the books. Plus, Richard is the landlord to almost all the tenants in the Royal Arcade.

Not bad, as he said he didn’t come from a monied background. He grew up on a council estate in Wales, moving to Worthing with his family when he was 12.

At 16, he spoke with a careers advisor at school as he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next, except that it ‘had to be something creative, something with his hands and he didn’t want to get dirty’.

Hairdressing was suggested, and while he said he didn’t know much about it, he had long hair and thought it might be a fit for him.

He got a job as a stylist in Hubbard’s department store, which later became Debenhams, then moved to a small salon in Montague Street before starting work on cruise liners.

He did this for three years, travelling the world with contracts taking him around Europe, America, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia and the south Pacific.

It was after he came back that he found the Royal Arcade premises, having always known he wanted to work for himself.

He said: “My mother didn’t want me to do hairdressing, she said it was too much risk, but I didn’t have anything to lose so I was always going to go for it.

“I think it was that confidence in myself that made the business a success. I don’t think I ever thought it wouldn’t do well. You have to have that belief to succeed.”

And while he has a plan for when he does decide to retire, with such a strong entrepreneurial spirit still very much evident it’s hard to imagine Richard slowing down any time soon!