Additional lengths wins local business of the year award

The Tees Valley business community came together to celebrate outstanding leading women from the region with their fifth Tees Businesswomen Awards event on Tuesday evening, where Additional Lengths won the prestigious Business of the Year title. The awards night recognises the region’s best businesswomen, with the Business of Year award seeking a female-inspired Teesside business with outstanding recent success and achieving excellent results within their sector. Having started Additional Lengths from her parent’s house in 2003, Victoria Lynch is a hair extensionist first and has used her skills to build her business and develop hair extensions into a multi-million business in the heart of Stockton. Additional Lengths distributes hair extensions, including their leading brand Remi Cachet, and other hair products all around the world from their 20,000 sq ft warehouse in Stockton on Tees. They also have a store and salon in the town centre and in total, across their three locations, 92% of the team are women. “If anything, we learned from the pandemic – it helped us identify some of the areas we weren’t focusing on and the customer groups we were missing out on. It gave us that opportunity to rethink the development of the business – we turned a negative into a positive,” explained Victoria, who is the managing director of Additional Lengths. Turning their attention to the global market and online presence has driven further success for Additional Lengths. Talking after her win, Victoria thanked her team: “We’ve been through a pandemic and come out of the other side, doing tremendously well, which I attribute to the team working with me – they’re right behind me, making sure we deliver my dreams, goals and aims. They’re there every step of the way. It’s what’s got us to the position we are today as a business.” Victoria previously won the SME of the Year at the Tees Businesswomen Awards in 2019. Also an avid campaigner for the local high street, to support the Additional Lengths shop and separate salon, Victoria works on The Stockton Bid scheme.