Train Your People
Train the people responsible for getting it right.
6 hours. 6 domains. One practical production standard.
The Texture Ready™ Private Cohort trains the people around the chair: the ones who plan, hire, budget, schedule, document, and respond. Not technique. The production competencies that decide whether a qualified stylist can actually do the job.
Black Hair Is Hair · Cambridge · 2023
Who attends
The people who make
the work possible.
The Cohort is built for the people who sign off on time, money, and staffing. If you decide what goes in the budget, what goes on the call sheet, who gets hired, or what happens when something goes wrong, this is for you.
Stylists bring the craft. The Cohort trains everyone else to build a production that craft can work inside.
The Hair Lead
Plans, budgets, documents, leads. No license required. Does not touch hair. Often an existing team member, a costumer, a stage manager, an associate director, equipped to carry it. The specialist does the hands-on work, vetted and scheduled by the Lead. Separate by design.
- Producers, general managers, and production managers
- Stage managers and assistant stage managers
- Costume, wig, and hair department leadership
- Artistic and executive directors
- Line producers and UPMs on film, TV, and commercial work
- Union field staff and member education teams
- Conservatory faculty and production staff
- Casting directors and agents who place talent into productions
The curriculum
Six domains.
What you leave able to do.
Every domain maps to a decision a production actually makes. Participants leave with language, tools, and authority, not a certificate of attendance.
Foundational hair knowledge across all types and protective styles. The cultural and historical context that grounds the work. Understanding textured hair well enough to make responsible production decisions.
Read a hair plan and know whether it is realistic. Recognize what a style asks of a performer's hair over a run. Stop deferring every hair decision to whoever seems most comfortable with it.
Working command of styles, install, and maintenance. Install times, maintenance intervals, real costs, and feasibility across the production cycle. The language to communicate clearly with performers and professionals.
Talk to a stylist as a peer. Identify the expertise a production actually needs and verify it. Tell a director what a design will cost in hours and dollars before it is promised.
Hair as a department, built into the budget before casting. Pre-casting reserve, call sheet integration, dressing room standards, specialist labor forecasting, vendor pathways, contingency across rehearsal, tech, and run.
Build a hair budget that survives week 2. Put maintenance time on the call sheet. Know where the expertise comes from before you need it, instead of from one person's phone.
Documented intake delivered to every performer, regardless of hair type. A consent framework signed before the first hair call that defines what the production is and is not authorized to do, and creates a record for both sides.
Learn what performers need early enough for it to shape the plan. Hold a record if anything later breaks. Never ask a performer to consent to something in the chair.
The relational competency. Holding a hair conversation that is not an interrogation. Recognizing that silence is not consent. Speaking honestly with directors about feasibility without making the performer the messenger.
Put performers in chairs, not in the position of educating their own production. Tell the difference between a performer who is satisfied and one who is managing your discomfort.
A defined escalation pathway known to every performer before first rehearsal. Stop-the-line protocol, design renegotiation, incident documentation, and working knowledge of the relevant union provisions in AEA, SAG-AFTRA, and IATSE agreements.
Know who holds maintenance and what happens when the plan isn't working. Respond to a problem with a protocol instead of an apology. Meet the obligations already written into your agreements.
What the Cohort is not
Not hands-on
technique training.
Nobody leaves the Cohort knowing how to braid. That is not the gap. The gap is the production around the braid: the budget that never planned for it, the call sheet that never scheduled it, the consent that was never documented, the escalation path that never existed.
Stylists bring the craft. The Cohort trains the six domains as production-environment competencies so the craft has somewhere to land.
For stylists and practitioners
Hair professionals earn the same credential, through the same curriculum. Practitioner seats are sponsored by unions, institutions, productions, or brands, not sold individually. If you're a working stylist who wants in, join the updates list and you'll hear first when a sponsored cohort opens.
Format
Scheduled around
your calendar.
6 hours of curriculum in three parts: Literacy and Fluency, then Architecture and Consent, then Care and Escalation. Delivered privately for your organization, tailored to your roster, your agreements, and the productions on your season. Three delivery options:
Three virtual sessions
2 hours each, spread across days or weeks. The default for distributed teams and union staff.
Two half-days
3 hours each, virtual or in person. Fits a production week without losing a full day.
One full day
In person, retreat-style. The strongest option for leadership teams and conservatory faculty.
Share the room
No budget for a full cohort? Convene one. $8,500 covers the room, so peer organizations can fill it together: 3 organizations sending 4 people each is 12 seats, $10,000 total, about $3,333 per organization, invoiced separately. One organization convenes, everyone's people get trained and credentialed. Funders and service organizations can sponsor a shared cohort outright.
Every format includes a knowledge check after the first session, a live walkthrough of the hair budget tool, and the assignment that makes it real: you run a production of your own through it before the final session. You leave with the starter intake and consent template, the ledger of 10 production defaults, your own escalation pathway page, and the credential assessment.
Texture Ready™ Private Cohort
Train Your People
Investment
$8,500
Up to 10 participants. $750 per additional seat, 16 maximum.
Pair with Production Readiness as the Full Standard from $19,500 and your team runs the system it helped build.
Bring a Cohort to Your Organization →The credential
A standard your people
carry forward.
Participants who complete the curriculum and pass the assessment become Texture Ready™ Credential Holders. The assessment runs 12 questions across the six domains. 9 are knowledge-based and can be reviewed in advance. 3 assess relational competency, are administered live, and are not published.
The credential is valid for 2 years with a renewal pathway in the third. It travels with the individual: to the next production, the next company, the next contract.
- Issued to individuals who complete the full curriculum and pass the assessment
- Verifies demonstrated knowledge across Literacy, Fluency, Architecture, Consent, Care, and Escalation
- Does not certify hands-on styling proficiency, and is not meant to
- Does not make a production Equipped. Organizations earn a separate mark, Texture Ready™ Equipped, which requires the system build plus 2 active Credential Holders on staff
- Answers the question agreements ask and don't define: who counts as qualified
Two cohorts in
The room
keeps agreeing.
Convened in Cohort 1
From Feedback Respondents
Theater · Film · Casting · Education · Legal · Union · Press · Tech
"This is not just an added, nice-to-have thing for productions, but actually critically necessary, and easier and more practical to implement than I would have thought."
"The level of intention required is important, but it is not hard if people do just a little of the work they would do for anything else critical to a production."
"There is so much I need to understand, and Kira's presentation was an honest, knowledgeable, and passionate way for me to learn about this important topic that affects so many actors in our community."
Beyond a single production
Adapted for unions,
industry bodies, and
conservatories.
The same six domains, reframed for the people who support or enforce the standard rather than run a production. Union field staff learn to recognize a problem on set before it becomes a grievance. Member education teams get a workshop they can run. Conservatory faculty teach the standard before students inherit the industry's defaults.
Unions and industry organizations → The Conservatory Standard →
Bring the training to your organization.
30 minutes. Tell us who is in the room, what agreements you work under, and what's on your season. We'll tell you what the Cohort looks like for your team and a real number, not a range.
Bring a Cohort to Your Organization →Need to make the case internally first? The one-page overview is here.