I grew up in a countryside where hair work was part of daily life for many families. Among all the work going on around me as a child, I especially remember the bundles of hair being bought, combed, sorted and processed by the hands of local craftspeople, before they left Vietnam for markets far away across the world.
So, to me, hair has never been only a product. It is a craft I have watched since I was small, part of my memory of the place I grew up, and a trade that has given a livelihood to many generations of people in my hometown.
The story is closer still, because my mother was once one of the workers in a hair production workshop. At the time, I never imagined that one day I would enter this same trade. But the images of hair, of the craftspeople, and of a product from the Vietnamese countryside that could travel so far, stayed with me.
Later, I left home for Hanoi and chose fashion. Studying and working in design taught me to see hair from a different angle. I realised that hair is not only a material to be manufactured or exported. Hair is also fashion. It shapes appearance, personality and beauty, and the way a person expresses who they are.
And it was at the meeting point between a trade I had known since childhood and the aesthetic sense I developed as an adult that AUCO HAIR began.
I wanted to approach the Vietnamese hair industry in a different way: to carry forward the value of its raw material, its techniques and the hands of Vietnamese craftspeople, while bringing to it the thinking of a contemporary brand, in design, imagery, quality and experience.
AUCO was not created only to bring Vietnamese hair to the world. We want the way the world sees Vietnamese hair to change as well.
From a product made in Vietnam, to a product chosen by businesses, stylists and brands in many markets, not only for its quality, but for the professionalism, the aesthetics and the values that stand behind it.
That is the path AUCO has set out to follow: