TEAM SPIRIT: Turning Heads with JoicoAt the opening session of Joico’s recent sales and education event, the crowd was on its feet dancing Psy Gangnam Style.  This 35-year old company is spry, inventive, fun-loving and with a comprehensive education program and crack team of artists, takes their training seriously.

Angelia Polsinelli, Senior Director of North American Education, joined Joico with a goal of building a Joico Corporate Education Development Department dedicated to communicating the company’s vision.  Today, with an eight-member in-house department established, Polsinelli and her team will be busy in 2013. In the new year, they will be sharing a new tag line, “Turn Heads”, many new products, a repackage, and a new color collection.

““Our reason for being is to service our sales department and help them share with hairdressers our overall persona as a company,” says Polsinelli.  “A fully-staffed internal team enables us to be extremely responsive to the market needs. If we feel that sales needs to be trained and motivated, or if the stores need a special program, we can put that together and go in and train store employees and managers on business and motivation techniques.”

Polsinelli created National Corporate Trainers positions to be held by hairdressers, one focusing on haircolor and the other on general Joico knowledge.   These two trainers— Tookie Carlson and Melessia Wade-Smith –take the yearly trend collections and break them down into the J-Cut and J-Color methodology.  They also work with sales so they can speak to salon owners and truly understand Joico products, Joico color and the importance of both to salons.

National Education Development Manager Tommy De Vries works with Joico Marketing to ensure new products are relevant to hairdressers needs.  “Tommy oversees testing of new products to get market approval and ensure that it fulfills the hairdresser needs, always keeping the marketing department salon-oriented in their thinking. “

In the field, there are twelve full time education managers, Territory Managers, who work directly with Joico’s distribution partners. And these twelve oversee 350 part-time educators.

Twenty-five guest artists are guided by International Artistic Directors Damien Carney and Sue Pemberton and are called into service as platform artists and at press and red carpet events.

All of these part-time and guest artists receive complimentary Joico training.  “We are very committed to the learning of hairdressers,” said Polsinelli. “We offer all our artistic updates and skills training to all our guest artists and part time educators at no cost. We want them to stay motivated and inspired.  Also, the better their skills are the more personal growth they experience and the better career possibilities open to them in Joico.”

Everyone connected to Joico education will be staying informed through new Joico Education Technology or JET. Launching January 1st, this interactive online program was designed for educators, District Sales Consultants, store employees, internal staff and guest artists as a way to share product knowledge and training tips in a fun, informative way.

 “Now, people can learn in their own place, own space and have a lot of fun winning prizes, while learning about the company,” says Polsinelli

Interested in becoming a part-time educator with Joico?  Contact an education manager in your area.  As Polsinelli points out, “Many of our full time territory managers came from our pool of part-time educators.  It’s a great way to get started with Joico.” 

www.joico.com

For reprint and licensing requests for this article, Click here.

Read more about