How Swiss-designed wigs make their way from Bali to the big screen
Far from where he grew up in eastern Switzerland, Bali-based Orlando Bassi makes handmade wigs for Hollywood and Broadway productions – so successfully that he can afford to pay two butlers.
Orlando Bassi still remembers the moment he first experienced the intense scent of mastic. It was St Nicholas Day and Bassi, as a young boy from the Rhine valley in Switzerland’s eastern canton of St Gallen, was dressed up as a little Santa Claus, his fluffy buffalo-hair beard stuck on with glue made by the Mastix brand. The smell has stayed with him ever since.
Bassi, now 56, runs a company producing handmade wigs on the Indonesian island of Bali. You might even have already seen a few of his creations: among other clients, Bassi caters for the film industry in Hollywood, for Broadway productions or for Netflix series.
For legal reasons, he can’t name all the productions he’s worked with, but they include a number of blockbusters. For example, the 2023 box-office hit Barbie. Bassi won’t say which heads his wigs were perched on, “but a lot of them were ours”.
Barristers and judges in the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries also sport wigs from Bassi’s workshop. But his route to the world’s stages and courtrooms was a long one.
For Bassi, the journey began the day after his childhood appearance as Santa Claus. The young boy went to the make-up artist who’d glued his beard on to watch him at work. “The make-up, the hair, the whole affair fascinated me,” he says by telephone from Bali.
Since there was no such thing as a professional apprenticeship as a make-up artist, Bassi did a traineeship as a men’s hairdresser, which would have qualified him to then do specialised make-up training. But in the meantime, during his apprenticeship, he had already worked on film and theatre productions and attended courses in Switzerland and Germany. And so, directly after he received his qualification, he opened his own business in his hometown of Buchs – Studio Bassi.
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World of wigs
Working in theatres at home and abroad, Bassi noticed a demand for wigs. Along with staff in his Buchs studio, he started to make hairpieces by hand, at the same time keeping his eyes open for where they could be mass-produced. “Back then Korea was a hotspot,” he says. He went to the Asian country and began training staff with a partner firm who could make wigs for him, travelling backwards and forth between Switzerland and Korea, dealing in know-how and wigs.
However, all this happened as the wig industry began gravitating towards China. Bassi followed the trend but soon noticed that he wasn’t happy there. “It was a huge culture shock,” he says. Instead his wanderings took him to Indonesia, where he started over again, training people in the art of wig- making. He started moving between Indonesia and Switzerland, spending weeks at a time in each country. Ultimately he decided to found his own firm in Bali and settle there; and so, while he carried on commuting, Indonesia was now his main home.
Childhood dream
The country amazed him from the start, although he says he wouldn’t describe it as “perfect”. “Actually it’s too hot and humid for me,” he laughs. Nevertheless, he found the chaos and the people fascinating.
What’s more, Bali gave him the chance to fulfil a life-long dream – hiring a butler! “Even as a kid, I’d always said that at some point I wanted to have my own butler,” Bassi says. Today he has two, who take care of food and cleaning at home, as well as a personal assistant who accompanies him on his frequent travels. It has nothing to do with lordly pretensions, says Bassi. He depends on his staff, and in the meantime – over the course of some 15 years together – they’ve become more like family members to him.
The butlers and personal assistant also keep Bassi’s mind free to focus on business. Along with his wig company, he’s founded various other firms linked to the film industry, including for the manufacture of make-up, artificial body parts, teeth and monsters for horror movies. Bassi also established Bali’s first professionally-equipped film studio in order to produce his own films.
The ‘Made in Switzerland’ factor
Switzerland means more to Bassi than just roots. His products are still shipped exclusively via his business in Buchs, where it all began. That also goes down well with customers. “Switzerland is a mark of quality, that definitely helps – and we highlight it,” says Bassi.
His studio also still makes some products in Switzerland. For example, wig-stands, or rather, the Rolls Royce of wig-stands – a “bloody expensive” item, Bassi says. But customers want the label “made in Switzerland”.
Family model
Bassi is a self-made man – he never trained as a manager or a commercial director. “Everything I do comes from the gut,” he says.
Moreover, he’s learnt that certain leadership qualities are valued in Indonesia. “A company is like one big family,” he says, but a family with a clear hierarchy. At the top is the boss, who decides everything, has the final say and is loved and respected like a father figure. But the boss is also the person who has to bear the consequences if things go wrong.
In recent years, especially given the perspective of handing over his business, Bassi has started introducing hierarchical structures, “like in a real business”. He has also tried to change the culture: “people have to be aware that mistakes have consequences”, he says.
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Staying clear of politics
Bassi isn’t interested in politics; he doesn’t participate in Swiss elections or votes. “I don’t think I’ve really got much to contribute,” he says. Instead he focusses on contributing to the local community and being a role model for the 240 employees in his company.
The Covid-19 pandemic hit the entertainment industry hard, and Bassi’s business also faltered. “I had to pump in a lot of private money,” he says. His hope was that the pandemic would pass in a couple of months. But it didn’t, and so he realigned the firm. Instead of wigs for show business, he focused on producing so-called “street-style wigs”, used as fashion accessories as well as by people with cancer. It’s a line of business he’s since stuck with, while since the end of the pandemic orders for film wigs have also bounced back.
Switzerland – too tame
Bassi has lived in Bali for over 20 years now. He regularly comes back to Switzerland, but when he does, it’s his family, firm and friends which interest him, not the country itself.
“Of course I like the culture – it’s clean and the landscape never ceases to amaze me,” he says. But the fact that everything in Switzerland functions so perfectly is also why he’s always happy to leave again: “everything gets boring pretty quickly”.
Edited by Balz Rigendinger; translated from German by Thomas Skelton-Robinson/dos
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