It’s all about the buoy.

For decades, Buoy was a Wellington institution, an avant-garde beacon in an industry where loyalty rises and falls with the stars holding the scissors. Their people were legends in their own right, stylists whose reputations preceded them and whose clients followed them from chair to chair, year after year. Attached to the salon was a quietly extraordinary beauty spa, an elegant extension that completed the circle. It wasn’t just hair; it was a full philosophy of care.

Because beauty, at Buoy, was never only about how you looked. Yes, the craft mattered, the geometry of a cut, the glow of a treatment, the precision of colour. But the truer measure was how someone felt when they walked back out onto the Wellington streets. Buoy lifted people. They left a little taller, a little lighter, as if the air around them had changed. Treatments were considered, deeply customer-oriented, tuned to comfort, ease, and that impossible-to-fake feeling of being restored. If you didn’t feel like you were floating, they weren’t finished.

Yet even icons need renewal. Buoy had a long-established brand and visual identity, strong bones, instantly recognisable, and synonymous with national recognition. Year after year they stood among the country’s most awarded salons, a reputation earned through relentless craft. But over time, the system had fractured. Touchpoints drifted. The look and feel dulled. And with a business spanning both salon and spa, the identity strained to speak with coherence to both worlds.

The challenge was to rediscover what made Buoy, Buoy. To express a personality that had always been bold but never obscure; confident but never cold; distinct without becoming performative. This was the house that Derek Elvy helped build. Derek was the master, the mentor, the creative engine who inspired whole generations of stylists and reshaped the contours of New Zealand hair design. His legacy wasn’t loud, but it was unmistakable.

Black had always sat at the heart of the brand, not for any gothic romance, but because black is the colour of potential. Black is the beginning of a sketch, the quiet before an idea forms, the space where newness gathers itself. Our work needed to honour that symbolism while refining it, grounding it, and making it feel modern again.

The result was an identity that stepped forward rather than followed, one that straddled salon and spa with assurance, one that carried the spirit of reinvention that Buoy had always championed. It didn’t chase fashion; it set the conditions for it.