Happynion Apgujeong Flagship

Lead Artist

About

A miracle that came after bone-crushing pain! This is Elmom, leader of Happynion Apgujeong Flagship. I want to share my heart with you, just as it is. To everyone reading this — do you have a dream? I have a dream! Twenty years ago, when I first started in hair, the salon was nothing short of a playground for me, the intern L. I loved hair more than anything. And it was in 2009 that I became a designer and moved up to Seoul. From that tiny rooftop room, dreaming and vowing to succeed, my real life in hair truly began. I received so much love from so many customers and met countless people ^^ And it was in September 2015 that I first opened my own salon ^^ But after opening the salon, I was an incompetent leader. There were days I cried, days I despaired, days I was cheated — and I even went through every single employee quitting at once, experiencing failure after failure. What let me hold on with everything I had, the driving force that carried me through every moment, was my customers. I'm truly grateful. The faces of customers made happy by me, their satisfied smiles — those were what filled me with pride and joy. There is no happier moment than being able to give someone a good day. But I came to realize just how vast the gap is between passion and management. The higher I climbed, the emptier my heart felt, and the more my loneliness grew. Then one day, by pure chance, in 2021, I met a mentor for my life — someone I can only describe as sent from heaven. The moment I first met my mentor, I felt as if I were meeting Zhuge Liang in the flesh. They're known as a god of management, someone who has saved thousands in the hair industry. Over the four years since, I've gone through a complete transformation and been reborn as an endlessly growing salon. The first principle of management I learned was to redefine what hair styling means. Always make the people around you smile because of you — a salon built on individualism and selfishness will always fail. Our salon had been indifferent to one another. We were an individualistic organization where everyone just did their own job. From that point on, I began tearing everything down and rebuilding. Together with every member of our team, we set a shared goal and began to wake up again, thinking of our salon family twenty-four hours a day. The goal for Happynion's designers and interns is to become leaders. As they became leaders and grew endlessly, more and more of our team began to say they were so happy, sharing the same dream. I made up my mind. That I would live this one precious, irreplaceable life for the sake of hair professionals and for my customers, until the day I die. My mentor helped me build my dream bigger and higher. In 2023, I established the Hairdressers' Hope Foundation and donated my entire personal fortune. I made up my mind to establish a beauty college and change hair culture itself. Though I'm just a small hairstylist, I believe that everything you can imagine can come true. The first salon I dream of, A hairstylist (美容師) is, quite literally, a teacher (師) of a beautiful (美) face (容). I found a clear answer to the questions of why I do hair myself, why customers come to a salon, and why a leader runs a salon in the first place. In the past, I taught my team nothing but technique, relentlessly. But I was wrong. I was so focused on technique that I missed what truly mattered. It's a place where every customer's day feels good the moment they walk in and out, a place of inspiration and warmth, a place where laughter never stops. The second salon I dream of, A belief that you can become family even without sharing blood. Customers matter, of course, but to me, the team who meet customers face to face aren't just employees — they're truly family, blood or not. If I can pass on my love for hair styling to every member of our team, I have no doubt they'll treat our customers with that same heart. Passing that heart down through generations, and changing the hair culture of all of Apgujeong — that is my dream. However long it takes, I want to change hair culture and go global to share Korea's hair culture with the world. Thank you ^^