Hair Chateau

As early as six years old, Tim Gerrior knew his destiny. “People would ask, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and I’d say right away “I want to do hair!’” By age twelve, Tim was doing home perms and roller sets around his small-town Nova Scotia neighbourhood. “I did the rounds every Saturday and charged twelve bucks,” he remembers. There was a problem though: in his neck of the woods, there was nowhere to learn his dream trade. Relocating to far-away Truro for his licence was impossible. But as Tim explains it, “Fate stepped in.”

“Just as I was finishing high school, a new hairdressing school opened in town. Of course, I registered! I loved everything about it. Amazingly, that school lasted less than two years and then went bankrupt. I’ve always felt it opened just for me.”

The rest of Tim’s story is equally serendipitous. At age 19, craving a big-city adventure, he bought a one-way ticket to Montreal and landed the perfect job and a furnished apartment within hours of arriving, even though he’d done no advance planning, didn’t speak French, and was “a total country bumpkin.” (This image is hard to reconcile when you actually meet grown-up Tim: a confident, stylish, urban professional who looks like a guy half his age.)