SMALL BUSINESS SANTA BARBARA: A CUT WITH A SIDE OF GREEN
Cutting Edge offers a wide range of services and products, all while minimizing their environmental impact.
Cutting Edge offers a wide range of services and products, all while minimizing their environmental impact.
Cutting Edge Hair and Body Salon owner Cindi Sundberg has kept her Salon at the forefront of environmentalism for 24 years.
For 24 years, the Cutting Edge Hair and Body Salon has provided quality beauty services to the Goleta community while staying at the forefront of environmental responsibility.
Located at 5779 Calle Real Goleta, Cutting Edge is run by industry veteran Cindi Sundberg.
“Being in the Goleta community we’ve seen a lot of generations and have them go through all their life-changing events like birthdays, and weddings, and bar mitzvahs, and adoptions, and all kinds of really cool things. We’ve done the grandmas and the parents and the kids and the grandkids, so we’re pretty proud of that. It really humbles us that people share those events with us and come to get services to look beautiful for those events,” Ms. Sundberg told the News-Press.
The salon offers a wide range of services, including haircuts and coloring, massages, nail services, facials and spray tans. Clients of all ages come looking for the latest styles.
But the team at Cutting Edge doesn’t just care about staying trendy. Ms. Sundberg has built the salon to be environmentally friendly and makes sure the business is always giving back to the community.
“We’ve always had that philosophy,” Ms. Sundberg said.
In addition to donating hair to Matter of Trust to be used in oil spill cleanups, and giving old towels to local animal shelters, Cutting Edge stocks environmentally friendly products, specifically the Paul Mitchell hair product line.
Ms. Sundberg said Paul Mitchell was the first professional beauty company to publicly stand up against animal testing, and Cutting Edge has used and sold Paul Mitchell products since opening day. Ten years ago, the Cutting Edge team attended “The Gathering,” an annual Paul Mitchell showcase event in Las Vegas.
“The first time we went to that big one we learned so much more about Paul Mitchell and what they stood for that we decided to carry them exclusively. We’re called a focus salon. We’re committed to carrying that product exclusively. So we get a lot of support from them,” said Ms. Sundberg.
Cutting Edge also carries the Eminence facial product line. Every sale contributes to the company’s reforesting efforts.
“Every time we sell a product it helps plant trees, us individually, our own salon, and so far to date, since November of 2012, we’ve planted 3,188 trees at Cutting Edge alone. The company itself has planted over 12 million trees,” Ms. Sundberg said.
Whenever an opportunity to update the environmental impact of Cutting Edge presents itself, Ms. Sundberg takes it. This has led her to her next big step, making the Cutting Edge a Green Circle Salon.
Ms. Sundberg first heard of the Green Circle group from a Paul Mitchell representative earlier this year. Green Circle promotes itself as “the world’s first, and North America’s only, sustainable salon solution to recover and repurpose beauty waste ensuring that we can help keep people and the planet beautiful.”
Once she heard about Green Circle, Ms. Sundberg knew that Cutting Edge had to be a part of it. Waste at hair salons can be extremely high, and Ms. Sundberg found the amount of trash and chemicals being thrown out upsetting.
As a Green Circle Salon, each customer will be charged a small environmental fee of $1.70 that covers the cost of recycling.
“That is non-profit to us, and that cost from the client will cover anything we remove from you. Hair, or if you get waxing, the waxing strips. If you receive a facial, anything from cotton pads to Q-tips and the color tubes that we use. The tinfoil that we use, that’s huge to us. The tinfoil, we use a lot of that for highlighting and that goes straight in the trash, and that’s going to be recycled. So 95 percent of our waste is going to be recycled through Green Circle,” Ms. Sundberg said.
Ms. Sundberg said she hopes to have everything ready for mid-July, and is looking forward to joining big city salons in minimizing their environmental impact. When everything is settled, she wants to get other salons in the area on board with Green Circle.
“It’s a big thing for us because I really want to try to get other salons in our area to do it. Nobody in this town, Goletta or Santa Barbara, is part of this program,” she said.
