Most salons start with a simple goal, to open the doors and start booking clients. NAKID by Sharon Leavy started with a different problem entirely, and it is one most salon owners would consider a good one to have: too much talent, and nowhere of her own to put it.

By the time NAKID by Sharon Leavy came into being, Sharon had already spent years running The Academy by Sharon Leavy, training beauty therapists and hairdressers to a genuinely high standard. Students came through the doors, trained hard, qualified, and moved on, and Sharon kept sending them straight into other salons and spas across the country. It is exactly what a good training academy is supposed to do. But after enough graduating classes went on to build someone else’s business, Sharon started asking a fairly obvious question: why not build her own?

Where the Idea for NAKID by Sharon Leavy Came From

The idea behind NAKID by Sharon Leavy was not a grand five year plan, it was a practical response to something Sharon was seeing over and over again at the academy. It traces back further than most people realise, to Portlaoise College of Beauty & Complementary Therapies, the school where Sharon herself trained before she returned in 2010 to take it over and reshape it into what would eventually become The Academy by Sharon Leavy.

Every year after that, a fresh group of therapists and stylists would graduate at a genuinely high level, trained under the same standards Sharon herself had learned at sea managing spa teams on international cruise liners. Every year, those same graduates would go and prove that training somewhere else, under someone else’s name.

So Sharon made the shift from training talent for other salons to employing it herself. In 2018, that decision became NAKID by Sharon Leavy, a salon built specifically to give her own graduates somewhere genuinely excellent to work, and to give clients direct access to therapists trained to the exact standard Sharon had spent years building at the academy. You can read more about that background on the salon’s own About page.

First Year Anniversary, July 2019

NAKID by Sharon Leavy did not stay a quiet secret for long. By July 2019, the salon was marking its first year in business with a proper celebration, guests, decorations and all, rather than letting the milestone pass unnoticed. For a salon built on the idea of giving trained graduates somewhere to grow, that first anniversary was not just a party, it was proof the model was working. A full twelve months in, NAKID by Sharon Leavy already had a client base loyal enough to fill the pavement outside for the occasion.

The décor said as much as the guest list. A floral display in the shape of a giant number one hung inside the salon that day, a simple, literal marker of the milestone, and one that captured something true about NAKID by Sharon Leavy’s first year: it was built one careful step at a time, the same way the training behind it always had been.

From One Salon to Three: How NAKID by Sharon Leavy Grew

What makes NAKID by Sharon Leavy different from a typical salon opening is the direction it grew in. Rather than opening multiple identical locations, NAKID by Sharon Leavy expanded by specialism, adding NAKID Hair and The Skin Rooms alongside the original NAKID Beauty salon, each one staffed by therapists and stylists trained through the same academy pipeline. The result, based across two addresses on Harbour Street in Tullamore, Co. Offaly, is less like three separate businesses and more like one philosophy applied to three different parts of the industry: hair, beauty, and skin.

That structure also means NAKID by Sharon Leavy has never really been separate from The Academy by Sharon Leavy, even though they are two different businesses on two different websites. The academy is where the standard gets set. NAKID by Sharon Leavy is where clients get to experience it directly, delivered by therapists who trained under that same standard rather than picked it up on the job elsewhere. Growing a business alongside a training academy in a county town like Tullamore is also, in its own way, a vote of confidence in the local economy, the kind of investment Local Enterprise Office Offaly exists to support.

What NAKID by Sharon Leavy Offers Today

Walk through the doors of NAKID by Sharon Leavy today and the three specialisms are easy to see rather than just easy to describe. NAKID Hair covers the full range of cutting, colour and styling work, delivered from a dedicated row of styling chairs staffed by graduates trained through the same academy programme that shapes everything else about the brand. NAKID Beauty and The Skin Rooms sit alongside it, covering everything from nail care and pedicures, in a dedicated seating area built specifically for the job, through to facials and skin treatments delivered from a reception and retail space stocked with professional skincare brands rather than a generic shelf of extras.

It is a genuinely joined up model. A client booking a colour appointment at NAKID Hair is one door away from a therapist at The Skin Rooms, and both are trained to the exact same standard, because both came through the exact same academy. For clients, that consistency is the entire point of NAKID by Sharon Leavy, there is no gamble involved in which room you end up in.

Why the Model Behind NAKID by Sharon Leavy Matters

NAKID by Sharon Leavy has picked up genuine recognition within the industry since it opened, and that recognition tends to follow naturally from a fairly simple mechanism. When a salon employs its own trained graduates instead of hiring from a general pool, quality stops being something the salon hopes for and starts being something it can actually guarantee, because it built the training itself. Every therapist working under NAKID by Sharon Leavy came up through a system Sharon designed personally, shaped by her own years of experience managing high pressure spa teams internationally before she ever opened a salon of her own.

For clients, that means walking into NAKID Beauty, NAKID Hair or The Skin Rooms is not a gamble on whoever happens to be free that day, it is access to a therapist who trained specifically to meet the standard the brand is built on. If you would like to experience that for yourself, you can book an appointment directly. For the therapists themselves, it means a career path that used to end at graduation now continues somewhere Sharon has already built and is still actively growing.

What Comes Next for NAKID by Sharon Leavy

NAKID by Sharon Leavy is still, at its core, the same idea it started as: train properly, then give that training somewhere real to go. As the academy keeps producing new graduates, NAKID by Sharon Leavy keeps growing around them, one specialism and one Tullamore salon at a time. If you have been to NAKID before, you have already met the result of that idea in the room with you. If you have not, now is a good time to find out what a fully trained team, built from the ground up, actually feels like.