A decade ago, Darren Williams was obsessed by new releases from leading DJs on the rave scene. Now he’s more likely to be focused on the new hairstyles of celebrities such as Cheryl Cole and Katie Price. John Hill meets one half of the team behind the growing Harland Corporation in Seaham, formerly known as Hair X-Tensions.

IT’S Christmas Day just over five years ago, and North East couple Angela Place and Darren Williams are about to unwrap a picture-frame-sized present that will take over their lives.

The pair met in 2002 on a community website Williams had built to celebrate the rave music scene. At this point in our story, Williams was still working on the site, organising rave events across the region, and also focusing on a growing passion for web design.

Of course, the sharp-edged gift that turned up under the tree in 2005 was to change all that soon enough.

Williams says: “The rave scene was dying because there were no new records coming out and people were losing interest.

“At that point, we’d made a conscious decision to move into something different and spotted an opportunity with hair extensions. We’d been dabbling in selling them on eBay, but I decided to make the online shop as a present for Angie on Christmas Day.

“I made the website and registered the business as a limited company, then I framed the certificate and wrapped it in nice paper for Angie to unwrap on Christmas Day.”

Since its unofficial festive birth, Hair X-Tensions has grown into a business that boasts 2,000 lines of hair, sends out 4,000 products a month and employs 11 staff. It operates out of an office and warehouse unit in Seaham Grange Industrial Estate, and was recently re-branded as the Harland Corporation, a name which matches its lofty ambitions.

Williams says: “Our long-term aim is to be the Amazon of the hair and beauty world. My number one goal is to grow this company to be incredibly huge. It’s a case of painting a picture in your head and visualising yourself there. Then you just work backwards to see how you get there.”

The company has already won 11 awards, and prides itself on innovation in the hair and beauty market.

For example, when the company realised hair colour could often look different on screen, it introduced a service whereby a customer could send over their photo and have their colour accurately identified by staff.

It also prides itself on providing what the customer wants, a focus that echoes back to that rave website Williams set up in 2001.

Ultimatebuzz was a homage to all things rave, with its own chatroom as well as photos and information on DJs. In its time, it attracted 26,000 members and was home to around 3.5m messages posted by users. Williams started working on the project not long after the boss at his first job in a computer shop took him aside and showed him an exciting thing called “the internet”.

He says: “I asked what it was for, and he said I could search for anything, as long as it wasn’t rude photos. I had a DJ’s tape in my pocket so I looked around for information on that, but couldn’t find anything. I decided to make my own, and started learning about web design. It became a bit of an addiction.

“When I moved to EDS and was stationed in Derby, I had all this spare time so I just spent my days learning how to build a website.

“All the kids in the schools soon started talking about this new rave site and before long it had 26,000 members. The kids were on it so much it was banned from most of the secondary schools in the North East.

“People started chatting each other up in the chatroom. I thought: ‘Hey, get your own room. This is serious stuff about DJs and MCs,’ so I decided to build a separate dating site, partly so these people could go there instead and the rest of us could concentrate on rave.”

In 2002, North East Singles was born. Williams started trying to set up speed-dating events in North East nightclubs, and through that he met Jason Bushby at a venue in Darlington.

Bushby had run the Powerhouse music events that were popular on Teesside in the 1990s, and the pair decided to put on events of the same name for under-18s interested in the rave scene. Soon, the night was attracting 2,000 people a month, and they branched out to venues across the North East.

Williams says: “One thing I learned quickly is if you put on the best show in the world with the best DJs, you don’t need to do much advertising because the people do the advertising for you.”

While the dating idea fell away due to its constant demands on his wallet, Williams found himself earning a steady income through his web design agency Full Effect, which offered website builds and maintenance on a “pay-as-you-go” system in which the client would pay a monthly fee instead of a lump sum.

During this time, he found himself developing a few online shops for his clients.

He says: “One day I sat back in my chair and thought that, while I was making a website for this much money, the people who owned it were making £80,000 a month. That gave me the push I needed to get to the next level.”

Williams’ first retail experience was in a shop in the Galleries in Washington, selling CDs and other items in store and online to his Ultimatebuzz rave following. However, affording the rent was a challenge, and he now considers it only a “medium success”.

So where did the idea of selling hair extensions come from?

“Do you remember Zoe Birkitt off the Pop Idol show in 2002?”, he says. “She had this braided hair, and Angie quite fancied the look of it so she did it on herself.

“Then all her mates wanted her to do it for them too, so we would be driving to Leeds market and back to buy all this hair, and one day we wondered why we just didn’t order it direct ourselves. We searched on Chinese Google and started contacting manufacturers.”

While most hair extensions were being offered by salons at the time, Hair X-Tensions was able to offer the same quality of product at a lower price.

As the business took off, the couple found themselves living in a sea of boxes, and decided to shift out of their two-bedroom terrace in Washington into a bigger house.

Williams says: “We then had all these spare rooms, so we thought we might as well do a bigger order from China next time. So this huge wagon turned up outside our house one day and unloaded about 200 boxes. People in the neighbourhood were peering out of their windows, probably thinking it was knocked-off gear or something.”