S-7 Development Notes #1 | The Shampoo I Made for Myself, Not in a Boardroom

I wanted a shampoo built for people who wash their hair every day

Working in a salon, I wash other people’s hair many times a day. And I wash my own hair every day too. For me — and for most people in Japan — washing every single day is simply normal.

Over the last few years, my hands had gotten pretty rough. A hairdresser’s hands dry out and get worn down; that’s not hard for anyone to imagine. I’ve always had sensitive skin, and lately the dryness was bad enough that my hands were in a genuinely tough state.

A hairdresser’s hands get washed many times a day. Easily more than twice. On average, somewhere around ten times.

Separately, some of my clients are the kind of people who want to shampoo every day. Maybe fewer than in Japan, but the people who work out daily, who sweat at the gym, who use styling products — I get asked about it a lot as their stylist: “Is it really okay to shampoo every day?”

And it hit me: these two people need the same shampoo. Something gentle enough that washing every day doesn’t wear down your hair or your body. Something gentle enough that a hairdresser can wash head after head all day without paying for it with their hands.

A shampoo for hairdressers would also be a shampoo for our clients. That was where all of this started.

What I could see precisely because I’m a hairdresser

Honestly, I’m an amateur when it comes to product development. I’m not a chemist, and I’m not a researcher at some manufacturer.

But I am someone who has watched hair and scalp as closely as it’s possible to watch them. For nearly 29 years, every day, I’ve had my hands in all kinds of people’s hair — drying it, cutting it, washing it, reading by hand what state it’s in right now.

If anything, that sense in my hands is the one piece of real expertise I have.

A slightly reckless idea: “make it myself”

Let me try making the shampoo for my own work, myself.

When the thought first came to me, I had no real basis for believing I could. If anything, there were mountains of reasons I couldn’t. But I figured it would be faster to actually make one than to keep turning it over in my head.

Not writing a proposal in a boardroom, but building it on the salon floor, checking it against my own hands and hair. That was the whole starting point.

About a year of trying, fixing, and trying again

That’s where it got long. Honestly, I made it long myself — my standards were too high.

The first prototype was, to put it kindly, not a success. The lather, the way it rinsed, how it dried. I’d given up on fragrance from the start, because I was sure it would be too hard; early on it was meant to be unscented. And yet none of it quite closed that “one more step” gap. I’d adjust a little and make another, adjust again and make another. Before I knew it, I’d been repeating that for over a year.

When I counted, there were more than twenty prototypes that never saw the light of day. The ones that didn’t work far outnumbered the ones that did.

But the time I spent checking, by hand, each reason something hadn’t worked — that turned out to be the most valuable thing I got out of it. In this development diary, I want to write about those detours honestly, without hiding them.

And it became one shampoo: “S-7”

What I arrived at, after all of that, is S-7 Daily Shampoo. You wash every day — that’s seven times a week. So, “7.”

It’s a shampoo designed for people who wash often, every day. It’s built around hydrolyzed silk protein, with a soft, silky lather, and I aimed for a finish that feels light, clean, and balanced.

Even the fragrance I’d avoided at first — because I was sure it would be too hard — eventually became something I couldn’t skip, and after a lot of trial and error I finished a scent of our own. It’s called “MATSUYAMA,” named after Matsuyama in Ehime, Japan. It’s a bright, clean scent that brings to mind Japanese citrus and the forests around a hot-spring town. I drew inspiration from a trip to Ehime, and from development through to the finish, I completed all of it in San Francisco.

I’m not going to get into the fine details of ingredients or formulation here. That will come, little by little, in the entries ahead.

Right now, I’m in the final stretch

S-7 is in the final stage of its label and packaging right now. The inside is essentially settled; what’s left is working out how it gets into your hands.

I’m not going to make some big launch-date announcement here. It will take a little more time. But the feeling that something I’ve lived with for a long time is finally taking shape — that much, I can say for sure.

This development diary is the record of it. Not an introduction to a finished, polished product, but the process itself — one hairdresser building a single shampoo with his own hands. I’d like to leave that here, bit by bit, as I go.

I’ll share S-7’s launch news first with the people who’ve joined the launch list.

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