Some people are born lucky. They might only win small but they win often. It doesn’t happen to many folk but it happens to Chelsey Swann, co-owner, with Whitney Sharp, of Sharp and the Swann in Pensacola, FL. This summer she’s won a few trifles such as an eyeball-sequined purse and a Framar brush. But she’s also won big – 1,500 Scrummi biodegradable, disposable towels, enough to keep her, Whitney and their colleague Jessica Farrington going for a couple of months or more.
“Whitney was unsurprised because she thinks I win everything, but I don’t. Just sometimes,” laughs Chelsey, and as she does, her joy becomes infectious. “I’d seen it on Instagram, had reposted and then forgotten about it. We won 500 towels, which was amazing. The funny thing was I thought that was it. I didn’t realize it was an ongoing competition, but I loved the towels so much I put up lots of videos and posts about them: how absorbent they are, how easy to use and how our clients love them. Then we found out we’d won the actual challenge and would receive another 1,000 Scrummi towels.”
Sharp and the Swann is a tiny space. Chelsey describes it as a salon cottage, with no space for a washer and dryer. So the team took it in turns to take towels home to wash and dry, which was not only a burden but also a cost that couldn’t be offset against salon costs.
“I’d seen Scrummi a few years earlier when I’d visited Ena Salon, a lovely, sustainable business in London,” says Chelsey. “Their team were really excited about the towels and how sustainable they were, saving energy, water and time. They also loved that they didn’t have to do laundry any more. At the time, we were with a large salon where we didn’t have any influence on how sustainable the business was. But it’s been a priority with our own salon, which we opened in August 2023.”
With the new salon, they’ve partnered with Davines to help reduce their environmental impact, and have other sustainable options such as boxed water. Now, to the team's delight, they have Scrummi to cut their carbon footprint even further, while making their lives easier.
“Scrummi take up so little space. Cotton towels can be bulky so we can only store so many in the salon. Our cotton towels were only a year old and were supposedly stain and bleach-proof,” she says. “But they weren’t. And they were beginning to get holes in them. We were getting to where we didn’t want to put them on our clients. Now we don’t have to.”
The subscription service provided by Sustain Beauty Co, exclusive supplier of Scrummi, means the team don’t have to do anything to get their next delivery of towels or worry about where to store large quantities in their tiny space. With salon towel subscriptions as small as 50 and boxes as large as 500, the timing and quantity are completely customizable.Big on absorbency, compact on size, a month’s supply of Scrummi will take up less room than a week’s-worth of cotton towels. With Scrummi, the whole team and the salon has won, not just Chelsey.
