Before Oz Hair and Beauty became a $100 million retailer, Anthony Nappa maxed out his overdraft by buying stock he couldn’t shift quickly enough. Suppliers needed paying, but sales hadn’t met expectations, and the young entrepreneur wondered whether he had ruined everything. “That was one moment where I thought, did I just stuff all this up?” he recalled to Inside Retail. Nappa traded his way out within a month or two, but remembers feeling deeply scared.

Today, Oz Hair and Beauty employs more than 500 people and generates annual revenue exceeding $100 million. As the family’s salon heritage reaches its 40-year milestone, Nappa and his brother Guy are targeting 50 stores by June 2027. Behind those milestones, however, is a story of uncomfortable decisions and learning on the job. The brothers have had to keep developing their own capabilities while building a business that demands more of them. 

In 2012, Nappa was studying full-time, working weekends as a waiter and packing six or seven daily orders from a corner of his father’s warehouse. His $10,000 savings helped buy out his father’s friends from an online venture they had struggled to establish. Initially, he sourced products from his parents’ salons, paying for stock as it sold. Eventually, he was clearing their shelves so efficiently that he needed his own supplier accounts. 

While the family provided relationships, reputation and an education in customer service, building an e-commerce business required another skill set. A decisive shift came in 2017, when Oz Hair and Beauty moved onto Shopify and invested in attracting customers to its own platform rather than relying on Ebay.

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