What you’ll notice when you enter HD Cutz, aside from the lit up red logo and clean, brown leather chairs, is the framed football shirts, some gifted by the stars that the barber, founder and creative director Sheldon Edwards — Mr HD himself — boasts as clients.
These include Karim Benzema, Antonio Rudiger, Raheem Sterling, Gabriel Jesus, Riyad Mahrez, Jaden Sancho. There’s a signed yellow Chelsea top of Reece James, “I was cutting him since he was a kid, these are some of the people that grew up under my wings”, and there’s Callum Hudson-Odoi, “I knew Callum’s parents before Callum was born,” Edwards tells me.
Most notable is Phil Foden’s signed Man City jersey —Edwards is the artist behind his bleached hair ahead of Euro 2020, a recreation of Paul Gascogine’s style at Euro ‘96 — “it became one of the most viral looks that we ever did,” Edwards says, “everybody wanted to do the Phil Foden blonde.”
Today Sheldon Edwards has amassed an audience of over 1.2 million on instagram, and amongst his clients are not only Premier League and international footballers, but artists like Wizkid, Burna Boy, and Lil Baby — not to mention a Dior Sauvage ambassadorship and the distinction of being the official barber for the Fifa 2022 World Cup. He’s committed himself to excellence, precision and refining his craft — ensuring that his barbershop is able to provide a range of services, from colouring, to plaiting, to knotless braids, “I’m proud to say that at HD Cutz we do everything.” But what’s compelling about Edwards is not only where he’s arrived, but how he got here, and his story as an inspiring tale of migrant aspiration and redefining success.
Born in 1985 in May Penn, Clarendon, Jamaica, Edwards is a third-generation barber. His grandfather owned a barbershop, Slick’s, and when he died the shop was left to his father who “knew nothing about barbering.”
“I was a watchman in the salon, I just had to watch the guys and make sure they were honest in my dad’s salon. And whilst I was doing that I fell in love with barbering.” Whilst his father took little interest in barbering, pivoting his use of the shop to selling products, Edwards was keen to develop his skills, which he did by observing. “No one wanted to teach me because a watchman was like security, they hated watchmen in the salon. So I cultivated my skill by watching each and every one of them, and then made it my own way, the HD way.” He first started cutting hair at 10 years old, getting his practice from cutting the hair of his schoolmates in the back of the cafeteria at lunchtime in exchange for lunch money, “I got into a lot of trouble for that!” he laughs.”
At 14 years old, he left Jamaica for the UK to live with his mother, first settling on the Patmore Estate in Battersea. Mostly he remembers the freezing cold, but also how his expectations of life in the UK were quickly subverted. “It was crazy, right because my thoughts and what I envisioned of London was nothing compared to what I met when I got here. I used to think that my mum really had it good and that you know, like it was pretty easy going over here, but when I came and saw my mum struggling, three, four or five cleaning jobs, that’s when reality hit me.” Though he had enrolled at Brixton College to study Business, Computing and Accounting, he felt that taking up work as a barber could be a better path to helping retire his mother from her cleaning jobs and secure his family’s future prosperity. Still, barbering as a profession wasn’t something he had been encouraged into, despite it being a family industry, “my family never envisioned me to be a barber, they wanted me to go to school, college, university. Growing up in my community in Jamaica, you know, there’s a certain stigma around not going to college and university, that people think that’s the way of life you know, that’s the direction you need to go.”
Despite this, Edwards reduced his college hours to part time and began working at Emmanuel’s barbershop in Clapham Junction, where he used to take his younger cousin, around half a mile from where HD Cutz is today. “Emmanuel has done a lot for me and my career, there I perfect my craft and fell in love with it all over again.” Emmanuel had a strong influence on Edwards, being an aspirational model for the kind of man he could be, “growing up in Jamaica, you give respect to the older the older people, you give them a lot of respect. And that’s what I gave him. And in turn he gave me a lot of freedom to cultivate and create who I am today.”
“I was learning customer service, I was learning how to be under pressure. When I say pressure, there were people coming in for back-to-back haircuts that just needed to get out. You know, there’s people coming in at late hours after the shift is finished, that he just had to sacrifice and get done. You know, I learned a lot of humbleness. I learned how to be relaxed and chill and definitely talk to people, it helped me to be a great conversationalist, you know, and hence why people are coming into my chair now. They got that sense of comfortability from speaking to me.”
Edwards thinks that fostering relationships with experienced older people could be the key to solving some of the issues troubling the capital and the social breakdown happening amongst youths. He feels that conditions today are even worse than he was young due to funding cuts and the closure of youth services. “There’s not really too much platforms or places [young people] can go to be themselves, there’s a lack of community centres.” Edwards is passionate when speaking on this, “We’re in a society where the youth are turning to knife crime and stabbing. With my academy I’d like to help people in a similar way I was helped as a teenager. To find themselves, to find a craft they love and to go into the world and change somebody’s life.”
There’s not really too much places young people can go to be themselves — we’re in a society where the youth are turning to knife crime and stabbing
As a London teenager, he feels that he could’ve gone down “the negative way” without strong parental and community influences, “the were a lot of adversities growing up, that’s why I know what the kids at the moment are going through.” It’s because of this that he intends to set up the HD Cutz Global Academy, which he says will be opening in two months, the aim of the academy being to train young people in the skills of the barbering profession, but also “so that young people can believe in themselves. And they can find a home within a home that they can love.”
The journey for Edwards hasn’t always run smoothly. HD Cutz was once the site of Bliss, a salon where Edwards had worked since the year 2000. “After quite a number of years I built myself up, I was a junior barber but I believed in myself. Within myself I wanted to be better. But I was kicked from this shop because I started to elevate with my HD Cutz branding, I started to promote myself. Unfortunately the owner of the shop, a very good friend, he did not see the vision, and he got a bit jealous of where I was going.”
Edwards says that he was kicked out of the shop around 2015, and was “stranded” with nowhere to work, doing pop-ups in hotels just to keep customers happy, but with profits disappearing as they went back into expenses. After moving between different hairdressers in the South London area, he found that the premises where Bliss had been became available. “And I didn’t want to come here, but my mum took me to pray about it, and the dream was realised. I came here, and I made HD Cutz, and this is us today.”
Barbering has taken Edwards to destinations he could have never dreamed of. Of the best of these experiences, he immediately answers Australia, where he accompanied the hero of his native country, Usain Bolt in 2018. “He took me out there and it was really good experience, experience, different culture, different people. This is the first time I’ve ever been so far away from home. Usain Bolt, you know, just seeing the person the legend himself, how he carried himself, you know what it took for him to get where he is. Those are the kinds of stuff that motivated and also inspired me to be where I am today.”
The opportunities associated with barbering have certainly transformed. Edwards is at the forefront of a shift in the profession from the humble shop floor, to movie sets, private jets, backstage at international concerts, and bringing to the spotlight cosmetic labour which has previously been invisible. Edwards feels the profession is finally getting the respect it deserves, “I’ve lived to see barbering elevate, people never used to give respect to the barber. You were just a little barber. Shut up, you’re just a barber. But what we’re doing in 2023 is opening doors for many people all over the globe.” He feels that it’s now become an aspirational career for young people, which is part of why he’s so dedicated to opening an academy so that he can continue to influence generations of barbers in the way that he was influenced by his grandfather and by older barbers he’s been under the wing of along the way.
Community is ultimately at Edwards heart. Ensuring the shop is a space people can feel comfortable is his key priority, “we represent the nation on a global scale. We represent the people. We don’t represent no one for just colour, sex, sexuality, nationality, or gender. We respect everyone for who they are as a person.” And even between the travelling, the signed football shirts, and the megastars he still considers himself a barber for everyone — “I still work here many hours a day. I still cut hair for the children of the lady who’s gonna owe me and doesn’t have no money to pay me for two weeks, three weeks, one month whatever it is. I’m still a people’s person, I’m still a human, just because I’m a celebrity barber doesn’t take away my human side and that’s why the people love me.”
