Winnie Loo

You must always be willing to cut your losses. I dare to fail.

The tin miner’s daughter who chose scissors #

Winnie Loo was born in Ipoh, Perak—Malaysia’s former tin mining capital—the eighth of nine children in a family that ran tin mining and iron foundry businesses. Her passion for hair emerged at twelve, when she began experimenting by cutting and styling her mother’s hair.

Family expectations pointed toward traditional education. In a Malaysian-Chinese household where eight siblings had followed conventional paths, choosing hairdressing over a university degree was an act of quiet defiance that required careful negotiation. She leveraged a missed university entry exam deadline to convince her father to let her study hairdressing in London instead. In 1976, at twenty, she enrolled at Morris Masterclass International for her comprehensive diploma and took cutting courses at Vidal Sassoon—graduating from both.

London should have vindicated the gamble. Instead, discrimination defined those years. Physically small at just over 40 kilograms, she was nicknamed “Tiny Winnie” and treated as incompetent by colleagues who assumed her size reflected her ability. Customers refused her services, saying “she must be the new kid on the block.” She was relegated to shampooing and perming while colleagues with less training cut hair. The credentials she had earned counted for nothing against the prejudice she encountered daily.

When six colleagues became one common enemy #

Seeking a path home, she moved to Singapore and joined a hotel-based salon owned by a woman with six stylists. The experience proved worse than London. Her six colleagues—who had previously competed against each other—united against her as their “common enemy and punching bag.”

They criticized everything she did, even when customers expressed satisfaction. The workplace hostility was relentless and coordinated. Initially the female owner was understanding, ignoring what Winnie calls “vicious politicking.” But when she realized all six stylists felt threatened by this small Malaysian newcomer, she sided with the majority to protect her business.

“Looking back, I believe my kind and pleasant attitude towards others had been misconstrued as being a meek and timid person and made me a target of bullies at the work place,” Winnie later reflected. “Being the fighter that I am, I believe in myself and refused to be brought down by my tormentors.”

Rather than continue fighting, she walked away and returned to Malaysia. She was 23, trained by one of the most recognized names in hairdressing, and had been driven out of two countries’ salons by hostile colleagues who saw her competence as a threat rather than an asset. The experience left a mark that shaped every decision that followed: she would never again place her professional fate in the hands of people who saw her kindness as weakness and her skill as a threat.

The 428-square-foot beginning #

Back in Kuala Lumpur, a regular client offered a way forward: a business partnership of RM20,000 each for a 428-square-foot salon at Wisma HLA. That original partner later sold her shares. Winnie’s boyfriend Richard Teo stepped in as replacement—becoming first her business partner, then her husband, and eventually the co-founder without whom the enterprise would not have survived its hardest years.

What began as a financial arrangement became the most important relationship of her professional life. “He is the strict parent,” she later explained. “I am the suggestive voice.” Where she led with warmth and creative instinct, Richard provided the structure and discipline that kept the business grounded. The couple won the BrandLaureate SMEs Business Couple of the Year award in 2017—recognition that treated the partnership as the unit of achievement, not the individual.

A mother’s impossible choice #

The tension that tested everything she had built arrived in the early 1990s, not as a single crisis but as a sustained pressure that accumulated until it demanded a decision. Her son Marcus was young. The business was growing. And Winnie had earned exactly the kind of professional recognition that accelerating ambitions demand: appointments as personal stylist to Brunei’s Royal Family.

In hairdressing, service to a royal household is the highest validation available—an endorsement that no marketing budget can manufacture. Winnie had reached that level. But the appointments were frequent, requiring regular trips from Kuala Lumpur to Brunei, extended absences that a growing salon could absorb but that early parenthood could not.

“At the time, I was busy having to travel to Brunei very often for the royal household appointments,” she later recalled. “I really found I had to choose between career and family.” The recognition she had built across more than a decade—Vidal Sassoon training, survival of two hostile salon environments, the construction of A Cut Above from 428 square feet—had finally opened the most prestigious door in her industry. It had opened at precisely the moment when being present at home mattered most.

The pressure demanded a structural answer, not a personal sacrifice. Richard Teo’s partnership—the “strict parent” who handled structure and discipline while she provided creative guidance—became the foundation for building an operational structure that could sustain A Cut Above without her constant presence. The arrangement that had built a business now extended to making it resilient enough to run while she balanced the demands of motherhood.

She chose to stay. Marcus grew up in the business she had refused to abandon—not as a spectator but as a participant, eventually joining in a commercial role alongside his father and developing his own strategic contributions. The next generation had not merely inherited a business—he had extended it.

In 2024, Winnie made the transfer explicit. She was “happy to pass the baton to my son Marcus, giving him a lot more authority to plan for the rest of the year.” The impossible choice she once faced—career or family—had resolved itself, across three decades, into an outcome no business plan could have anticipated: a son who stayed, and an institution worth leading.

From scissors to microphone #

The 1997 World Master of the Craft award from New York’s Art and Fashion Group made her the first Malaysian so honored. Ernst & Young’s 2010 Woman Entrepreneur of the Year award followed—the first time a hair industry entrepreneur received the prestigious recognition.

Between those two milestones, Schwarzkopf appointed her Creative Ambassador for Asia, a role she held from 2001 to 2007—the first time a global brand recognised her standards on her own terms, not as a representative of Malaysian hairdressing but as a peer. In 2005, she put the journey on paper: A Cut Above: Built on Hard Work, True Grit and a Pair of Scissors, published by Kanyin Publications—an autobiography that set down in writing what the preceding 26 years had demonstrated in practice: that professional reputation, built through discipline and refusal to be driven out, outlasts every bully who helped shape it.

The most significant personal transition came in 2022, when she became the first female President of the Branding Association of Malaysia in its 22-year history — a role that took her beyond the salon entirely and into the business community she had spent decades trying to elevate. As she describes her current focus: “I hold a microphone more than a pair of scissors now.”

Her BAM presidency centers on three objectives: pushing creativity in branding, expanding networking for business connectivity, and maintaining quality standards in Malaysia’s post-pandemic business environment. Her 2024 calendar illustrates the evolution: Shanghai for the Asia Hairdresser Festival in June, London for Salon International in October, Japan as a judge at the United Danks Hair Competition in November. Speaking engagements now fill the hours once devoted to client hair.

“I want to push entrepreneurs to be future superheroes, train them to stand up and shine,” she explains. “I want to give talks that inspire them.” The woman once dismissed as Tiny Winnie now mentors the next generation of Malaysian business builders.

The mission beyond the chair #

In 2004, Winnie turned a personal conviction into an institution. The A Cut Above Academy in Bandar Sunway was designed to solve a problem she had lived through: an industry that treated its practitioners as expendable and its training as optional. The woman who had been dismissed as “Tiny Winnie” and denied the right to cut hair built a school specifically to ensure that the next generation of Malaysian hairdressers would never face the same credentialing gap.

The academy—internationally recognised as the best hairdressing institution in Malaysia for three consecutive years—represented the clearest line between the bullied trainee and the industry leader: she could not change how London and Singapore had treated her, but she could change how Malaysia trained its own. The academy closed in 2022, after eighteen years, a casualty of COVID-19 disruptions. For Winnie, the closure was personal — it meant the end of the institution she had built specifically so that no young Malaysian hairdresser would face the isolation and dismissal she had endured in London and Singapore. Its legacy endures in the thousands of graduates and the professional standards it established.

The courage to close #

The X-Cut express chain—a budget concept that peaked at eight or nine locations—was the most expensive lesson of her career. When the concept failed to sustain itself, she closed the entire chain rather than nurse it along. No announcement, no gradual wind-down—a clean decision and a quiet exit.

“I dare to fail,” she reflects. “I set goals, we set goals and be prudent but I’m willing to let go when things aren’t what I expect. If you ask me how I have failed, I’ll tell you that I may have failed in doing things the way I wanted but, no matter, I achieved the goal.”

Today, Winnie Loo operates from strength built through documented struggle. “Looking back, I believe my kind and pleasant attitude towards others had been misconstrued as being a meek and timid person,” she reflects on those early years. The quality her tormentors mistook for weakness—an instinct for warmth over confrontation—became the foundation of everything she built afterward: a partnership with Richard that endured because she chose collaboration over control, a salon culture that retained staff because she remembered what it felt like to be driven out, and a son who chose to stay because the business his mother built felt worth inheriting.

The bullied trainee became World Master. The mother whose resolve was tested by competing demands raised the son who now leads operations. The founder who once expanded to 19 salons learned that knowing when to stop is its own form of mastery.

Last updated: April 30, 2026