GM Hair Design is a Christchurch hair salon on Cashel Street in the central city, and the home of its own range of haircare. The brand's motto — the most important thing you wear is your hair — sums up the approach: salon appointments bookable online or by phone, backed by shampoos, conditioners, treatments and styling products made in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The GM range is organised around hair types: coloured hair; curly, dry, frizzy or grey and white hair; an everyday pair; and the No Yellow toning shampoo and conditioner. A leave-in conditioner and the Salvage Intensive Protein Treatment sit alongside, with the Keratin Spray and the MHC creams and gel covering styling. MIKE Haircare, the brand's earlier shampoo and conditioner label, has been rebranded as Haircandy.
Beyond the chair, GM runs an online store for its products and styling tools, lists events on its site and welcomes enquiries from stylists through its careers page.
Step off Cashel Street into GM Hair Design and you quickly get the idea behind the place. The line the brand puts front and centre — the most important thing you wear is your hair — doubles as a fair summary of what the salon is about: everyday people, everyday hair, and a serious amount of care about how both are looked after.
GM Hair Design operates in the heart of Christchurch's CBD at 300 Cashel Street, and it does two things at once. It is a working salon where you can book a hair appointment online or over the phone, and it is the home of the GM product range — shampoos, conditioners, treatments and styling products the team makes itself. The site's own phrase for it is disarming: hair styling products made with love in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Rather than one shampoo for everyone, the GM conditioning and cleansing line is split into formulas aimed at particular hair. There is a shampoo and matching conditioner for coloured hair, a pair for curly, dry, frizzy or grey and white hair, and an everyday duo for regular washing. The No Yellow shampoo and conditioner round out the group as the toning pair for anyone battling unwanted yellow tones.
Beyond the wash-and-rinse basics sit two specialists. The G.M Leave in Conditioner stays in the hair between washes, and the G.M Salvage Intensive Protein Treatment is the heavy-duty option in the range — an intensive protein treatment for hair that needs more than an ordinary conditioner can give it.
On the styling side, GM's Keratin Spray leads its own collection. Alongside it sits the MHC collection — the initials carried over from MIKE Haircare — with three products: a Texturising Cream, an Everything Cream and a Gel. Together they make a straightforward, salon-grade styling kit you can take home.
The salon's styling tools get the same attention. The range includes carbon cutting and tail combs and a diffuser made for the OmniFlex™ hair dryer, all sold through the online store alongside the haircare.
If you knew the brand's shampoo and conditioner under the MIKE Haircare name, note the change: MIKE Haircare has been rebranded to Haircandy, and the shampoo and conditioner now live under that name at haircandy.nz. The MHC collection remains available through GM.
Appointments can be booked through the online booking system linked from the site, or by calling 0800 464 247. The full catalogue — haircare, styling products and tools — is shoppable online with checkout direct from the website, so you can restock between visits.
GM also keeps a wider world going around the salon: an events page for what is coming up, a careers page for stylists interested in joining, and a Join the Club email list that promises exclusive deals and early access to new products. For a Cashel Street salon, GM Hair Design casts a wide net — and the haircare on its shelves is made in the same city.