The studio is new, the hands behind it are not
Foster & Length Studio is a private hair extension studio in Lake Country, BC, working with women across the North and South Okanagan who want length and density that nobody clocks. It is run by one person. I have been fitting extensions for eleven years, several of them before the training schools offered a course in it.
I see ten to fifteen clients a week and do every appointment myself, from the audit through to the move-up. There is no front desk, no rotating staff, and nobody else in the room.
I stopped putting it off
I spent several years in a corporate job before any of this. The work was fine and it was not mine. What I wanted was room to make my own decisions about how a client is treated, and as a young mother I wanted a business built around my family rather than one that competed with it.
That was the plan for a while. Plans like that can sit still for years.
What moved it was a brain tumour diagnosis, and surgery to relieve the pressure it was causing. Going through that changed how I thought about where my time was going.
I did not want the diagnosis to define me, but it did encourage me to stop putting off something I had wanted to do for a long time.
The studio is what came out of that. It is deliberately small, deliberately private, and built to run at the pace the work actually needs rather than the pace a salon floor demands.
Four things this studio does differently, and holds to
- The audit comes before the method, always. Density, scalp condition and elasticity get assessed before anything is recommended. No method gets picked off a menu because it is the one that books fastest.
- I will tell you to wait. If your hair cannot carry extensions right now, that is what the audit is for and that is what you will hear. It is not a good sales appointment and it is the right answer.
- One client at a time, by appointment only. No walk-ins, no double-booking, nobody else in the room. The studio is a private space rather than a chair on a floor.
- Consultation, install and aftercare are separate. Three stages with their own time, not one long appointment where the last part gets rushed because the day ran over.
Eleven years, and what that actually buys you
Twelve years in the trade, eleven of them focused on extensions specifically. I trained with Minxtensions in 2015, and I was fitting extensions before that, back when the schools did not yet offer a course in it. That detail matters more than it sounds. It means the early years were spent working things out on real heads rather than being handed a method and a supplier list.
What eleven years buys you is not a longer menu. It is the ability to look at fine hair with a thinning crown and know which of four methods will hold and which will cause a problem in four months. It is knowing that a client who works out daily needs her rows placed differently from one who does not. It is having seen enough removals to know what a badly matched method does on the way out, not just on the way in.
Most of what I do in an appointment is decide. The fitting is the easy part.
You don’t need therapy. You just need Laurie and extensions.
From a client review
I have kept that one.
If that sounds like the way you would want this done
The first step is a conversation, not a booking. Leave your number and I will call you back to talk through what your hair is doing and whether a hair-health audit is the right place to start.