John Frieda: Because he's worth it

John Frieda has built a multimillion-dollar business out of must-have products for frizzy hair and blondes. He tells Tina Gaudoin how moving to the United States turned him into a 'hair god'

Why is everyone talking about Lulu and no one talking about John Frieda?" asks a woman sitting next to me in the hairdressers (which is admittedly John Frieda in London's New Cavendish Street). It's a good question though. Frieda, who was once known here in the UK for being married to the pop pixie from Glasgow and also, but seemingly less importantly, for being a good hairdresser, is regarded in America as something of a haircare god.

After quitting London at the end of the Eighties (not before he had created the Purdy cut and given good blow dry to every celeb in town including the Princess of Wales), Frieda set up shop in the USA. In Manhattan, where he opened his first salon, he could have made a good living alongside other European hair maestros such as John Barret at Bergdorf Goodman and Frederick Fekkai. But Frieda chose what turned out to be a much more serendipitous route – the development of haircare products.

In just under a decade, Frieda has built a multi-million dollar business out of the gloop that we women put in our hair. In 2002, the turnover for his haircare product line alone is estimated to be $230m with 36-per-cent average annual growth. Frieda ranks number three in haircare in the UK with only the two personal-care giants Unilever and Procter & Gamble ahead of him. Both are reported to be worried. "How the hell did he do that?" asks one of their marketing number.

Frieda, who has great plans for Europe (and then presumably world domination), doesn't want to give the game away, but he will admit that he lucked out with his first product – a tiny little bottle of lotion called Frizz-Ease. What Frieda recognised – that the rest of the American haircare market did not – was that American women probably spend half of their adult lives trying valiantly to calm their frizzy hair. "To an American woman, having frizzy hair is like having spinach in your teeth," says a New Yorker, "you cannot leave the building". Not surprisingly, Frizz-Ease was a blockbuster. The TV commercial, which featured Frieda (looking handsome) and a glum frizzy-haired girl helped. "It was pretty low budget and we weren't sure how it would work out," says Frieda modestly, going on to admit that "yes, it did really well on both sides of the Atlantic".

A slew of other haircare products followed, including the phenomenally successful Sheer Blonde Range, which includes a product called Ocean Wave created especially to give us all that "must have" crunchy, oily sand and sea look. Frieda's most recent commercial for the Blonde range is the glossy up-market antithesis of his first attempt and it illustrates just how far he has come in the business. Featuring the winsome blonde twins of his business partner – Alex and Britney Smith, singing a song commissioned especially for Frieda called "Are You Ready?" – it has been lauded in the USA as the first "rock" hair product commercial.

Alex and Britney are now celebrities in their own right, complete with John Frieda haircuts. Frieda, a master of laid-back understatement, says that he is pleased with his success, but that he never wants to get too removed from the business of cutting hair. "It's very important to be in touch creatively," he says, which is why he opened a salon (complete with its own pool) in Los Angeles, ceding control to Meg Ryan's hairstylist, the terminally cool Sally Hirschberger.

Frieda lives between homes in Connecticut, Manhattan and London, where his two original salons thrive. "I like living in both places; each has its advantages," he says diplomatically. He appears to be so laid back that one wonders how he became a haircare baron in the world's most competitive market. The calm exterior, which friends report is aided by a strict nutritional health regime, hides an ambitious, some might say ruthless, interior. It is, in fact, the perfect recipe for succeeding in the aggressively competitive, celebrity-hungry USA. "He appears to be going with the flow, but he has a game plan. He knows what he wants and he sticks to it," says one of his former employees.

"The key to success is really understanding what products women really want. We analyse every product we ever create to death. If we think there's a better way to do it, then we'll try it," says Frieda.

He says the idea of simply being a celebrity hairstylist who puts his or her name to a hair product appalls him ("Anyone can stick his or her face on a bottle of shampoo"). I wonder if he minds not attaining the same level of celebrity in his homeland as he has in the USA? "Not at all. I think that is born of the fact that I started here with the salons. Once I went to America, everything opened up to me. The market over there is five times as big. On the whole, women in America tend to be much more obsessive about the way they dress, the way they do their hair, the way they do their nails. Over in England, women are much more relaxed about that kind of thing."

So is Frieda implying that British women are slobs? He laughs. "No. In fact I think women in the UK and America are influenced by much of the same stuff – they're all looking at similar pictures in magazines, watching the same movies. Take Meg Ryan. Everyone wanted a Meg haircut at one time. But in Britain, not everyone felt they had to have one immediately."

Blondes have been pivotal to Frieda's success. Apart from the obvious fact that he once married one (he and Lulu divorced in the nineties) and he has a blonde son, Jordan, many of his product lines are created for blondes. "Everyone wants that sun-kissed blonde look don't they?" says Frieda, perhaps a little too blithely for this brunette writer's liking. When I disagree, he looks perplexed, arguing that dark-haired women don't require the same level of hair products that blondes do. After much discussion, he concedes that he might have to give the brunette product thing a whirl.

The interview is drawing to a close when he excitedly proclaims that he has already thought up the name for such a product: Sheer Placebo. "Trust me. I'm normally right about this stuff," he says with a grin.