OpenSeabright, Santa Cruz
PleasureHead
Case study — Seabright, Santa Cruz
Client
Pleasure Head Salon
Where
Seabright, Santa Cruz
Open since
2005
Status
In progress
The brief
Twenty years on one street, behind a website that could have been anyone's.
Pleasure Head has been cutting hair on Seabright Avenue since 2005 — family-owned, plants in every window, a golden retriever named Buster whose job title is Head of Welcomes. What they have online is still a stock template: a centered heading, one photo, and a paragraph of welcome text that a hundred other salons could run word for word.
Nothing in it said Seabright. Nothing said 2005. So the job was not to invent a personality — they already had a loud one — it was to stop hiding it. Photograph the room they actually work in, borrow the music the shop runs on, and put booking one thumb-reach away on a phone.
What was built
Their room, not a stock photo
The hero is the salon itself at golden hour — the hanging plants, the arched mirrors, the light coming through the front window on Seabright. Twenty years of a room look like twenty years of a room. No stock model, no gradient, no borrowed interior.
A menu you can play
Services sit on a record called The Setlist — a disc that spins under a real tonearm, categories cut like track groups, and a now-playing line that names whatever you point at. It turns a price list into something worth reading. Prices show as a sample menu and hand off to their live Square booking, so nothing on the page can go stale.
A lookbook that moves sideways
The gallery pins and scrolls horizontally as you move down the page — a strip of tall frames, the way a stylist would fan out photos on a counter. It reads as a portfolio instead of a grid of thumbnails.
Plants that spill over the edge
Between the hero and the page, a hand-drawn vine divider hangs the salon's own greenery over a torn-paper seam and sways on a slow loop. It is the one purely decorative thing on the site, and it is the detail people notice first.
“The room was already the best thing they had. The site just had to get out of its way.”
Your place has a personality too.
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