Some of the biggest beauty empires start small. Oz Hair & Beauty’s story is tinier still: one salon, one Sydney suburb, and a hairdresser named Elio Nappa who simply wanted to do great hair.

That was 1986. Forty years, three brothers, 37 stores and one very busy e-commerce platform later, Oz Hair & Beauty has grown into Australia’s leading omnichannel beauty retailer – and this year, the family is celebrating the milestone in style.

From One Rockdale Salon to a National Obsession: Oz Hair & Beauty Turns 40

Picture Rockdale in 1986. A modest salon, a young hairdresser named Elio Nappa behind the chair, and his wife Vanessa beside him, greeting regulars by name. There was no five-year plan, no e-commerce roadmap, no vision board with “37 stores” pinned to it. Just a couple who believed that if you did great hair, and treated people properly while you did it, the rest would follow.

Forty years later, it has. Oz Hair & Beauty is now Australia’s leading omnichannel beauty retailer, with 37 stores nationwide, a flagship in the heart of Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building, and three brothers still running the family business their parents built from nothing.

The Kids Grew Up, the Salon Grew With Them

Anthony, Guy and Dean Nappa didn’t inherit a business plan from their parents – they inherited a way of doing things. Watching Elio and Vanessa build Oz Hair salon by salon, the brothers absorbed something less tangible than the trade itself: that a haircut is never just a haircut, and a customer who feels looked after will always come back.

By 2012, Anthony could see the industry shifting under his feet. Salon clientele were loyal as ever, but shopping habits were moving online, and he didn’t want his father’s legacy left behind by the shift. So he built Oz Hair & Beauty’s ecommerce platform himself, carrying everything his parents had spent decades earning – the trust, the standards, the relationships – into a new format for a new generation of customers.

It worked. Today the platform stocks the salon-professional names customers used to have to book an appointment to access – Kerastase, K18, Redken, Dermalogica, Amika, Milk_shake and Redo Haircare among them – putting expert-level haircare within reach of anyone, anywhere in the country.

Still Sharing an Office, Forty Years Later

Ask Anthony what 40 years feels like, and he doesn’t reach for a polished corporate line. He reaches for the truth of it – the chaos, the family, the disbelief that it all somehow worked out.

“Forty years ago, Oz Hair was one salon in Rockdale with a lot of ambition from my parents Elio and Venessa – nobody was talking about ecommerce, and definitely nobody had 500 staff or 35+ stores on the bingo card,” he says. “Somehow we got here anyway.”

He still shares an office with his brothers Guy and Dean – a detail he’ll happily admit “is either the smartest or most chaotic business decision our family ever made, depending on the day.” It’s the kind of line that only makes sense once you understand this isn’t really a corporate milestone story. It’s a family that grew up together, went into business together, and still hasn’t tired of each other’s company forty years on.

“We’re beyond excited to celebrate the team that’s grown with us, who have become family, and turned a family salon into a national obsession,” Anthony adds.

Great Hair, Served With Care

To mark the anniversary, the brand has launched Great Hair Is Served – a campaign that treats the hair routine like a carefully plated meal. It’s a fitting metaphor for how the Nappa family has always approached the business: nothing thrown together, everything considered. Great hair, like a great dish, is layered – the prep, the treatment, the finish – each step given the attention it deserves.

It’s a small, playful campaign with a much bigger story sitting underneath it: forty years of a family showing up, one client, one salon, one bottle of product at a time.

Forty Years, and Still Family-Run

Most retail success stories eventually lose the thread back to where they started. Oz Hair & Beauty hasn’t. The name above the door has changed, the store count has multiplied, and the business now reaches customers who will never set foot in Rockdale – but the people running it are still the same family who started it, still arguing over office space, still doing it for the same reason Elio did in 1986: because great hair, and the people who help you get there, matter.

Here’s to the next 40 years of great hair, served the Oz Hair & Beauty way.