HairBoutique Blog

Let me first start by saying that HairBoutique.com is not perfect. As Founder/CEO I’m the first to admit that and I am constantly working 24/7 to improve our Internet presence and to make HB.com a warm and welcoming place for our visitors.

Our HairTalk Forum software (always accidentally or due to a software bug) will sometimes lock visitors out and throw them into a horrendous Catch22 of them trying to get a password reset and emailing them to tell them a new password is being sent but then no password reset screen link ever arrives. They keep trying until they send an SOS to HairBoutique.com Customer Care and it is manually reset for them.

Catch22 Password Reset

We also sometimes have the same Catch22 Password Reset issue for customers and visitors to the Hairboutique.com Marketplace, HairWizard, My HairBoutique.com, The Dressing Room and other parts of Hairboutique.com which since 1997 has grown to cover over 1 million pages of content, images and related “stuff”, as I call it.

I Am A Huge Twitter Fan

Anyone reading my blog knows that I am a major Twitter fan. I Tweet to the @HairBoutique Twitter account on a daily basis and have done live Tweeting there for the Academy Awards of Hair - NAHA 2009 - as well as Cosmoprof2009 and several awards including the 2009 Independent Spirit Awards. I Tweet about everything that is appropriate to hair, beauty, fashion and feature many of the Hairboutique followers on my HairBoutique Blog. (more…)

The Leadership Vacuum:  What We Lose With The Next Generation

The mass exodus of Baby Boomers from the workplace has already begun. According to the US Office of Personnel Management, between 2006 and 2010 Boomer retirement will have robbed American companies of nearly 290,000 full-time experienced employees.

(Image of workers - by Woodsy - All Rights Reserved).

While the financial crisis has forced some to postpone retirement for a couple extra years, we can’t count on the majority of them to be fully contributing members of the workforce much longer.

Silver hair, pension funds and personal memories of a Kennedy assassination are not the only things our struggling economic engine will lose when Boomers settle into the quiet life. (more…)

A few weeks ago I wrote a Blog where I made a specific point of listing some of my #FollowFriday (#FF) Friends in the Hair and Beauty Industry (more will eventually follow).

(Image from Jana Kollárová - All Rights Reserved).

The reason I wrote a blog instead of just Tweeting about my #FF Friends was because I have more than just a handful I appreciate and want to recommend.

Although #FollowFriday is one of my favorite days of the week on Twitter, there are mixed feelings about the now famous #FF day.

Why?  Some people consider it more like being spammed than helping to share the news about great people to follow.

Talk to ten people about why they are active on Twitter and you will get ten different reasons.  Some Tweeple specifically want to meet new friends, business contacts and have the heightened ability to network with like minds. (more…)

You know who they are.  Every employer, unless they have amazing luck, have had at least one of them pass through their doors.

The “nightmare employees” aka NEs have a hard time arriving on time (and have a myriad of excuses why they can’t), freely use company resources (ranging from company phones to PCs to email services) to make extended personal phone calls to their mothers, wives, husbands, boyfriends, kids, nannies etc.,

They also sneak out early and run their side businesses and/or projects while they are on your time.

They may steal company supplies ranging from pads and pens to food, sodas and water, provided for the rest of the company.

Nightmare employees (NEs) rarely work an honest full day and have to be micromanaged constantly. Even with micromanagement, they take it as a challenge to rebelliously do whatever they want on company time. (more…)

Even though my name is posted under all of the HairBoutique Blogs as the author, one of the most common questions I’m asked via email is who really  writes The Blog.  The second more frequent question is how are the various blog topics developed.

The truth?  I personally write every single word of every individual blog published as The Hairboutique Blog.  Yes, it’s me behind every blog published sharing my own personal opinions, thoughts and observations.

A few years ago I wrote a regular blog for DailyCeleb.com with the title of Hollywood And Mane.  I loved blogging immensely and was very sad when DailyCeleb.com stopped publishing their blogs.  They had a very good reason to stop, but it was a sad day for me.

I missed the daily experience of writing the Hollywood And Mane blog.  Yes, I still write lots of articles for magazines (101 Celebrity Hairstyles, Short Cuts Magazine, Harris Publications, HairBoutique.com, T&S Software) and other publishing outlets, but blogging resonated very closely to my heart and my love of hair, beauty, fashion, health, celebrity and related topics. (more…)