Creative HEAD UK January 2019

MARK MACIVER REVEALS HOW HE CARVED OUT A NICHE
IN BRITISH BARBERING WITH HIS SLIDERCUTS BRAND
Stormzy
Mark Maciver
Tinie Tempah
It’s been 16 years since Mark Maciver, then a teenage MC Slider,
first picked up a pair of clippers. His younger cousin was his first
client: “His mum just told us he needed a haircut, she sort of left
it in our hands about whether we took him to a barber or whether
we did it ourselves! That was the moment I got excited about the
idea of cutting someone else’s hair” – and word quickly spread.
People started coming to him when their regular barber was
unavailable. “They’d say ‘oh I’ll just get a shape-up from Slider’.
By then I was about 18 and I thought I was a pretty good barber!”
he laughs.
He jokingly told the manager of his local barber shop, D&L’s
in Holloway, as much when he bumped into him – only to be
stunned by his response. “He said: ‘well, if you’re better than my
guy, come and take his place.’ I said no because of the pressure of
cutting real clients, but for the next couple of months he and the
owner kept saying ‘when are you coming?’”
And finally, he went along, going in once a week to watch, learn
and cut his friends’ hair, gradually rising through the ranks.
He took on every project or event that came his way, “even if
they were boring and dead and I didn’t cut anyone’s hair,” he
recalls. “It wasn’t a game plan as such; I was just taking every
opportunity as it came.”
Instagram became the obvious choice for Mark to showcase
his work, and before long thousands were watching his cheerful
morning videos or his up-close detailing (he has almost 66,000
followers and counting).
Mark is highly detail-oriented and lays out his approach to
each cut in simple terms: “Trust the process. My barbering
08 Mister Quarterly