A hairdresser, a photographer and a gap on the set.

ELEVEN Australia was started by two people from the image side of hairdressing rather than from a laboratory. Its co-creators are the hairdresser Joey Scandizzo and the photographer Andrew O’Toole, as the Irish magazine IMAGE described them in October 2019. In an interview with the British trade magazine Hairdressers Journal in August 2019, the pair said “it all kicked off in 2011,” when they were working together on a magazine shoot in Sydney that involved photographing many different products.

According to that interview, Scandizzo “wasn’t impressed with the performance or the packaging of any of the products,” and the two saw room for “a simple and easy brand that hairdressers and consumers could understand.” They also said that at the time they “didn’t know anything about products or how to run a business.” The brand itself gives 2011 as its launch year.

Products named for what they do.

The brand’s central idea is plain language. ELEVEN says it uses “simple and uncomplicated product names,” so that customers know what they are buying, and its ranges are named as instructions or wishes in capital letters: I WANT BODY for volume, HYDRATE MY HAIR for moisture, SMOOTH ME NOW for frizz and REPAIR MY HAIR for hair damaged by heat tools or bleach. A blonde-care range follows the same pattern. On its website the brand calls itself “Hair & Body Care Made Simple.”

The product most often linked with the name is the Miracle Hair Treatment, which IMAGE called the brand’s “cult” product in 2019; the website now promotes a “Miracle Family” of related products. In the 2019 interview the founders described ELEVEN as “a fun, affordable brand that has a young and cool image” and quoted one of their tag lines: that hair “doesn’t need to be complicated — it just needs to work.” They added that the company gives its customers educational support and creates products that, in their words, “fill a need within the professional hairdressing market.”

ELEVEN describes itself as “a lifestyle brand for the young and young at heart” and lists five values on its site: proven performance, ease of understanding, natural ingredients, being “Australian born” and being “stylist created & approved.” It says its range spans 40 professional products, that it is “cruelty-free and PETA approved,” and that a selection of its products is vegan and gluten-free; we give those as the brand’s own descriptions. The range also extends beyond hair into body care.

Its visual identity leans on colour. When ELEVEN launched in Ireland in October 2019 with an event at Smock Alley in Dublin, IMAGE reported that the brand’s colourful logo had inspired the striped decor. Typefaces and official colour values are not published; the palette on this page is our own.

Salon haircare and its owners.

The seven brands in this group are all hair-care names: Joico, UNITE, Kerasilk, ELEVEN Australia, Philip B, Hairstory and Innersense. Hair-care brands sit at many different points in the trade, from small companies still run by the hairdressers or founders who started them to lines that now belong to much larger beauty groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a salon backbar to a department store or a website.

Salon brands in particular are often built by people who came from behind the chair, and many were first sold to salons before they reached shops. Their identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a bottle and a way of talking to stylists, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production to a contract manufacturer or grown far beyond the salon where it began.

That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Sydney to 27 countries.

ELEVEN grew outward from Australia through salons. By August 2019 the founders told Hairdressers Journal that the brand was in “over 27 countries,” and the brand’s website today says its products are sold across Europe and in 27 countries, naming New Zealand, the United States and Canada. The site runs separate storefronts for North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, and promotes services for salons, including a stockist programme, salon rewards and a digital colour assistant.

The Irish launch shows how the brand enters a market. IMAGE reported in October 2019 that ELEVEN had launched “with a bang and a splash of colour” at Smock Alley, in a partnership with the magazine, and that its products would be available in selected salons nationwide; the range it described ran from a sea salt texture spray and a deep-clean shampoo to detangling sprays, volume foams and body washes.

The company behind the brand is Australian. ELEVEN’s website names Eleven Australia Pty Ltd, which it says is part of the Eleven Australia Group, as the promoter of its competitions, and the brand describes itself as “Australian born.” The brand says it embraces “the fun, easy going Australian lifestyle.”

For a design guide, ELEVEN Australia shows how far a brand can go on naming alone: products called exactly what they do, set loud and in capitals, with colour doing the rest. Compare KEVIN.MURPHY, another Australian salon brand built by a working stylist, and UNITE, another professional haircare brand sold through salons. For this guide we use berry, pink and orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ELEVEN Australia’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.