Drove through Omaha last week and stopped at a random salon supply store

Found a brand of developer I'd never heard of called Brand X for $3.50 a bottle and decided to try it on a client, worked just as good as the name brand stuff. Has anyone else stumbled onto hidden gem products at smaller shops off the beaten path?

3 comments

3 Comments

spencer9811mo ago

I used to think you had to stick with the big names or you were asking for trouble, but hearing about your find with Brand X developer makes me wonder if I've been too closed minded. A few years back I grabbed a no name shampoo from a little shop in Iowa and it worked better than the expensive stuff I was using. You can find good quality if you're willing to give it a shot.

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mary_west1mo ago

Wait, are you serious? I was the exact same way until last year when I grabbed a random off brand shampoo from a little grocery store during a road trip. My girlfriend always swore by the expensive salon stuff, but that cheap bottle honestly made my hair feel way softer and cleaner than the $30 brand I used to buy. It completely changed my mind about what actually matters in a product. Now I'm way more open to trying stuff from random places, even if I've never heard of the company. You just never know what works until you give it a shot.

allen.kai1mo ago

Wait actually I gotta push back a little on that. The thing about Brand X is it's NOT just some random no-name brand, it's actually a pretty well known developer in the pro photography world. People confuse it with cheap stuff because it's not a household name like Canon or Nikon, but it's been around for decades and is respected by actual working photographers. That's totally different from grabbing a random shampoo off a shelf in Iowa. Your shampoo story is a real gamble, but Brand X is more like finding out that a trusted brand you never heard of makes a great product. If you want to talk about taking a shot on something truly unknown, that's a whole different level of trusting your luck. Just wanted to make that clear so you don't go around thinking every weird name you find is gonna be a hidden gem like that.