Afro Hair Studio

Andrew: How did these twins scale their family salon to a seven-figure business?

Afro Hair Studio: If we didn’t step in, the salon would not be here today.

Andrew: They’ve been open for 26 years and still growing, but it wasn’t all easy.

Afro Hair Studio: I guess you could really say they started from the actual bottom.

Andrew: They attribute this one thing to the main success of their salon.

Andrew: Would you say that genuine desire of like…

Andrew: is the biggest contributor to how successful Afro Hair Studio is?

Afro Hair Studio: A thousand percent. A thousand percent.

Andrew: This is a great interview with lots of gems and I had so much fun talking with them.

Afro Hair Studio: Let’s say Andrew was our daily client for a wig.

Andrew: Daily?

Afro Hair Studio: Let’s say Andrew was…

Andrew: No wonder you guys have such big figures.

Andrew: There’s even a little bit of a fun surprise at the end.

Andrew: Yo, I’m like kind of nervous.

Afro Hair Studio: Close your eyes.

Andrew: My name is Andrew, and this is the first of many business interviews on this channel.

Andrew: I hope you enjoy.

Andrew: Wow, okay. So this is the salon?

Andrew: This is the salon.

Afro Hair Studio: This is it.

Andrew: Before we get into the backstory and everything, all that good stuff, can you just tell me a little bit about this salon?

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, for sure.

Afro Hair Studio: So this is our original location that was founded in 1998.

Afro Hair Studio: So it’s almost 26 years now that we’ve been at this location.

Andrew: 26 years, that’s a long time.

Afro Hair Studio: If you look at the details, you can tell it’s 26 years.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah.

Andrew: Is that a good thing?

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah.

Afro Hair Studio: So it holds the history, you know?

Andrew: If you can take me back to 26 years ago, like before that, Why salon?

Andrew: Like why did you guys, or why did you and your family decide to do a hair business?

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, so if you go back before we opened in 1998, just being in the hair salon business in general and hair was a really big part of our family in general.

Afro Hair Studio: Going back to Ethiopia where our family’s from, our family on our mother’s side actually had a hair salon in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Afro Hair Studio: So the hair salon, having a hair salon in the family has been around even before our generation.

Afro Hair Studio: So it’s been around for a long time.

Afro Hair Studio: So back in Ethiopia, we had a hair salon on my mother’s side and that was always something that was deeply rooted in our family.

Afro Hair Studio: So when my mother moved to Canada, she always had it in mind, whenever she can come up with enough money to be able to start her own business, that it was always gonna be a hair salon.

Andrew: So when they came here, how much, do you have to know how much like capital they needed to- – Yeah.

Andrew: To start it, I’m assuming you need some money to start this right?

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, back then for them, their ballpark range was $10,000.

Afro Hair Studio: That was their goal.

Afro Hair Studio: $10,000, right.

Afro Hair Studio: To have that capital in order to start a business.

Afro Hair Studio: They come from very humble beginnings, so $100 was a lot, right?

Afro Hair Studio: There was a period of time when they had saved some money and came across some money from other means, works, family, and they were saving every penny and had that 10 grand available and were able to start a business.

Afro Hair Studio: Everything was used.

Afro Hair Studio: All chairs were used, barely any products in here, maybe one small section for products.

Afro Hair Studio: Today you see a lot of products.

Afro Hair Studio: And we have a lot of, like pretty big variety here.

Afro Hair Studio: We have pretty big variety at other locations.

Afro Hair Studio: So you’ll see that all here.

Afro Hair Studio: But when we originally started, there was no products, there was no hair.

Afro Hair Studio: So we weren’t selling anything at the time.

Afro Hair Studio: We were strictly just a salon.

Afro Hair Studio: I guess you can really say they started from the actual bottom.

Andrew: But at the start in ’98, when your parents opened this, how did they get their initial customers?

Afro Hair Studio: So when we first started, this was a time way before social media, way before marketing was a lot easier.

Afro Hair Studio: Luckily for our parents, they come from a really hardworking mindset, really hardworking family and for them, they’re not taking no’s for an answer and they’re working as hard as they can in any aspect to build their business.

Afro Hair Studio: That’s how they’ve always had that mindset.

Afro Hair Studio: So back then, it didn’t matter where we were going, it didn’t matter if we were out with family they were handing out cards they were handing out flyers. Our car for 15 years grand caravan 15 years we had an old caravan and it had our salon printed on all sides of the car. So on the hood on the windows on the back it would be it would just say Afro hair studio. Our website was on there, we had a massive logo, and we drove that everywhere. That was our daily driver we drove that to home we drove that it’s everywhere everywhere with us and that. That was a big part of our marketing.

Afro Hair Studio: So a lot of people around the city would see that for years ’cause we drove that same car for a very long time.

Andrew: Really?

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah.

Andrew: So that was like…

Afro Hair Studio: So that was one of the main marketing tools that we used.

Andrew: Driving around a truck painted with Afro Hair Studio.

Afro Hair Studio: Exactly.

Afro Hair Studio: So we drove around our Afro Hair Studio car.

Afro Hair Studio: Everywhere we went, didn’t matter if we were going on a…

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, didn’t matter if we were going on a road trip to Whistler, didn’t matter if we were just getting dropped off to school in the morning.

Afro Hair Studio: All the kids would always come up to us when we get dropped off or picked up and they were like, “What’s Afro Hair Studio?

Afro Hair Studio: What is this car?

Afro Hair Studio: So we were just always pushing marketing.

Afro Hair Studio: It was always in my parents’ mindset.

Afro Hair Studio: I think that’s why it’s a main thing for us even till today.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s always been a big thing to represent your brand as much as you can.

Afro Hair Studio: And really love representing it too.

Afro Hair Studio: You have to love it.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s something you’re going to do every single day.

Andrew: So your mom and dad ran this business, ran this salon for, you said, the first 19 years?

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah.

Andrew: So at what point did you guys like fully kind of, would you say, take over the business?

Andrew: or like manage more of your business?

Afro Hair Studio: So when we started helping out a bit was two reasons.

Afro Hair Studio: I think our initial goal was just to help our parents out.

Afro Hair Studio: We were realizing that they work really hard and we wanted to just give them a break.

Afro Hair Studio: But at the same time, we also saw a big gap in the salon.

Afro Hair Studio: The first aspect that I saw was we had a very modern approach to business.

Andrew: You two?

Afro Hair Studio: Me and Isaac.

Andrew: Okay.

Afro Hair Studio: So when I stepped in, I just was trying to add the new with the old.

Afro Hair Studio: The old was hard work every single day open in the salon working in the business and my mindset was working on the business from exteriorly and you I’m sure you’ve heard that term don’t work in your business as much as on your business.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, and it sounds corny, but it’s really accurate having immigrant parents that are of a generation. I had no social media They didn’t know how to use Facebook or Instagram or you know, just common social media tools Google and that was my first job. I just said let me reinvent our online presence. Put together the Instagram. Isaac put together most of our Instagram. I helped out on the Facebook Redid a bit of our website So just touched up everything on how it looked online made it look a little more professional.

Andrew: So if you guys are open to sharing, before that if it was just your mom and dad, kind of what was like I guess like the rough revenue that you brought in? And then yeah, once you guys stepped in and started doing social media, what was that like increase?

Afro Hair Studio: So they made $600, which back in the 90s is really good.

Afro Hair Studio: Remainder, for the first 15 years, it was in the mid to high five figures that they were earning.

Afro Hair Studio: So they’re able to take care of their family, stay in a comfortable area.

Afro Hair Studio: Obviously, you’re still living life, you’re watching everything you’re doing, you’re watching your business, you’re trying to, it’s hard to grow at that rate, but it’s easy to maintain.

Afro Hair Studio: But so for the following 10, 12 years, they were able to grow in increments every year, but up to a six figure business, low six figure business, but it did start capping off.

Afro Hair Studio: So about 15 to 17 years in, it was just, you saw a plateau for a couple years.

Andrew: That was like low, low six figures?

Afro Hair Studio: Low six figures, maybe mid six figures, low to mid six figures.

Afro Hair Studio: And it was just because marketing, the physical marketing got to the best they could do.

Afro Hair Studio: We were still at the one location.

Afro Hair Studio: It stayed relatively the same all the way until about 2017, 2018, 2019.

Afro Hair Studio: Those three years we started stepping in.

Afro Hair Studio: So our business, when we took over, uh, the marketing side and growing it is when we first saw our business go from the low to mid six figures to the high six figures. And that was a big change for us. It is a big jump, but we got to a point by 20, right after the pandemic, actually the second we reopened from the pandemic, for some reason we were double as busy as we’ve ever been.

Afro Hair Studio: Everyone wanted to get their hair done.

Afro Hair Studio: Everyone was sitting at home and not taking care of their hair.

Afro Hair Studio: So we were really, really busy and we were sitting there and we’re like thinking, it’s good. I feel like it’s gonna be really busy.

Afro Hair Studio: I know it did come out really busy and to the point where we were booked up for a week and then booked up for two weeks and then booked up for three weeks.

Afro Hair Studio: And we were like, if, if we had another location, we, uh, we were forced to open another location technically because we didn’t have enough space to accommodate all the clients.

Afro Hair Studio: And we said even if that location has nobody going to it on its own from natural growth or street growth, whatever it is, people walking in, just booking half of our clients to that location, we’ll cut it down to, we’re only booked up for a couple days.

Afro Hair Studio: So we’re just, the flow from here was able to take care of the other location, have more stations.

Afro Hair Studio: So that was our goal, so we went on a whole year hunt for, to find a place, negotiate prices.

Afro Hair Studio: It took time, but we found a location and we expanded to Afro Hair Studio number two.

Afro Hair Studio: And when that opened, simultaneously, we opened our wig retail store and product retail store called Wig Wonders.

Afro Hair Studio: That’s been the journey and that’s when we saw the business go from a high six figures and we finally cracked into the seven figures and now growing up into the seven figure business, which is obviously huge. Yeah, it is huge.

Afro Hair Studio: It is huge. It’s a, it’s a big accomplishment and it’s, uh, just again, just gives us room to grow our business. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Afro Hair Studio: More breathing room, uh, more space to take calculated risks and calculated risks are what grow your business.

Andrew: So that stepping in, taking on the social media role changed everything and now you’re at a seven figure.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah if we didn’t step in, the salon would not be here today.

Andrew: So can you tell me like what are the profit margins like for a salon?

Afro Hair Studio: In this space of business is a little easier, not easier to manage the business in any way, but it’s easier a little easier to profit but harder to have success in because it is a niche. It’s a niche so you there’s it’s hard to find mentors or to get people to give you ideas on this business.

Afro Hair Studio: But once you get the hang of it, it’s scalable but it’s also a little more profitable.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s close to 50/50, in some cases 70/30.

Andrew: Oh wow.

Afro Hair Studio: Where it’s 70% profit and 30% expense.

Andrew: Wow.

Afro Hair Studio: People don’t really notice that.

Afro Hair Studio: It depends on how you grow it because there’s so many different ways to scale your business.

Andrew: It’s a harder business to start and maintain but if you do it well, the margins are better.

Andrew: It could be up to 70% profit margin.

Afro Hair Studio: Easily, yeah.

Andrew: So what what are some of like the costs and expenses that you have monthly?

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, so the first expense outside of the interior stations and The first initial cost that go into the first month which is around a ten to twenty thousand dollar range Just that’s very base in order to get one or two stations a small area and everything that you need and then all your Hairstyling equipment that’s without the products just products for your clients

Andrew: So very bare minimum like 10, 20?

Afro Hair Studio: 10, 20,000 to start.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, and then depending on your location, you know, rent can be from anything as in Vancouver from 6,000 to 12,000 to 15,000.

Afro Hair Studio: Some places 20 to 25,000 dollars if you’re, depends on how prime your location is.

Andrew: Okay, so I noticed a lot of products, obviously, it’s a bunch of products.

Andrew: Is it important as a salon to be selling products?

Afro Hair Studio: I think it’s very important.

Afro Hair Studio: It does depend on what your mindset is as a salon owner.

Afro Hair Studio: It depends what you want for your customers.

Afro Hair Studio: It depends what you also want for yourself.

Afro Hair Studio: For us, our most important goal, like I said earlier, is customer service, making sure everything is the most convenient for our customers.

Afro Hair Studio: And we know when our customers come in and they get a service done, or even if they’ve just been a customer for a long time and they’ve already had their hair done, We know that since we are experts and we have been in the business for a very long time, we will know what’s best for our clients because we do their hair personally.

Andrew: So it’s all about just customer convenience and like you mentioned being the one-stop shop.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, just trying to tick all the boxes, right?

Afro Hair Studio: Like being able to get everything at a salon.

Andrew: Yeah, and is there a specific way, like how do you know what products to get?

Andrew: Like what is going to sell out or what’s more popular?

Andrew: Like how do you decide?

Afro Hair Studio: At first it was just mostly, you have to listen to your customers.

Andrew: Okay, so it’s really just asking them?

Afro Hair Studio: Just asking them, or sometimes you see people walk in for so many years when our parents first started, do you carry this, do you carry that, do you have this, do you have that?

Afro Hair Studio: And you hear 10 people, out of 10 people asking for a specific comb, five of them asked for a specific brand of that comb.

Afro Hair Studio: And then you go, why don’t we start carrying that, or why don’t we bring it in?

Afro Hair Studio: And it starts from there, and then it gets more specific as you go.

Afro Hair Studio: So, and you know, you just start ticking off your common stuff.

Afro Hair Studio: What does everyone use?

Afro Hair Studio: Shampoos, conditioners, some hair oil, hair gels, and whatnot, and you start getting the best ones.

Afro Hair Studio: That’s the safe way to start.

Afro Hair Studio: But usually you see what sells, you see what your clients want, what your clients ask for.

Afro Hair Studio: But now, after, you know, quarter century in the business, you start realizing like, oh, you know more, so you get an idea of exactly what you need, And it starts to grow in every aspect.

Afro Hair Studio: And then you can get more specifics, all the way down to small little details.

Andrew: So you guys mentioned you have two other locations.

Afro Hair Studio: We do, we have

Andrew: Wig Wonders in downtown.

Afro Hair Studio: Wig Wonders in downtown.

Andrew: Should we go to one of them first?

Afro Hair Studio: Let’s go, let’s go to Wig Wonders.

Afro Hair Studio: Let’s go. – Let’s do it.

Andrew: Wig Wonders.

Afro Hair Studio: The spot to be.

Afro Hair Studio: Welcome, welcome.

Andrew: Wow, there’s wigs.

Afro Hair Studio: There’s wigs.

Andrew: Okay, wow, that’s kind of creepy a little bit.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, it is.

Andrew: I’m not used to, you guys are used to seeing heads every day, but.

Afro Hair Studio: That’s true.

Afro Hair Studio: Actually, I could imagine if you’ve never, if you’re not used to seeing just wigs every single day, you come in, it’s kind of creepy.

Afro Hair Studio: You got 4,000 eyes just looking at you.

Andrew: 4,000.

Andrew: Okay, well, can you tell me a bit about the store?

Andrew: Like, what was the reasoning for opening just a wig store?

Afro Hair Studio: It was to, we saw a section of our salon growing and we wanted to have a special home for that, for those clients.

Afro Hair Studio: Wig Wonders, the concept was having a separate retail store where they can come in and browse, try on things privately in the back room or here in the front, however, whatever’s comfortable for them.

Afro Hair Studio: And they can grab all the products, everything they need.

Afro Hair Studio: At the same time, if for the clients who need the service, they just come one, 10 seconds from our, come down 10 seconds to Afro Hair Studio and we do the installation for them there as well.

Andrew: So the demand for wigs was so much that.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, the human hair and the wigs.

Afro Hair Studio: It was pretty high demand.

Andrew: I guess it’s interesting, would you say that’s kind of almost the downside of being a one-stop shop?

Andrew: Is because you have everything, which is great, but because you have everything, it can get your view…

Afro Hair Studio: It’s saturated.

Andrew: Yeah.

Afro Hair Studio: It can saturate the physical space.

Afro Hair Studio: Literally the space, yeah.

Afro Hair Studio: Because people are…

Afro Hair Studio: It looks like a Walmart some days, it’s just packed in there.

Afro Hair Studio: And it’s a checkout line and there’s people buying products.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s a good thing.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s a good problem.

Afro Hair Studio: But there’s been times where we’re like, “Oh man, I guess we marketed too good.” ‘Cause what happens is like, you know, it gets very busy.

Afro Hair Studio: And when you have one location that offers everything and that location ends up getting too busy, you have no choice but to expand.

Afro Hair Studio: You have to get bigger.

Afro Hair Studio: You get forced into it.

Andrew: So, coming to drive, original location, Wig Wonders.

Afro Hair Studio: Wig Wonders down the block.

Afro Hair Studio: And then the downtown one.

Afro Hair Studio: My favorite.

Afro Hair Studio: The biggest one.

Andrew: The biggest one.

Afro Hair Studio: Flagship, the flagship location.

Andrew: Is it?

Afro Hair Studio: I can call it flagship.

Andrew: Okay, let’s go to that one.

Afro Hair Studio: Yep, let’s do it.

Afro Hair Studio: What is the requirement of a flagship location? What does that mean?

Andrew: It has to be in downtown.

Afro Hair Studio: It has to be in downtown, yeah exactly.

Andrew: We’re heading to the downtown location to location two.

Andrew: Afro hair studio, the flagship.

Afro Hair Studio: The flagship spot.

Andrew: The flagship spot, okay.

Afro Hair Studio: Officially today.

Andrew: So can you guys talk to me about like what is the day-to-day of a salon owner like?

Andrew: Like what do you do on a daily basis? Clock in, you know?

Afro Hair Studio: It’s a lot of hours.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s really hard to maintain a consistent schedule when you’re a business owner of any sort.

Afro Hair Studio: There’s really no schedule.

Andrew: No schedule, it’s just like whatever’s gonna happen.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s hard to have a set schedule.

Afro Hair Studio: Like Isaac can say, can attest to this and so can I, but you’re constantly working.

Afro Hair Studio: There’s no days off.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s like you can, You’re always going to have notifications on your phone.

Afro Hair Studio: You will notice certain things as a business, as any business owner, there’s no days off. So that’s something that you have to understand, especially when you fall in love with your business.

Afro Hair Studio: You try to put your phone away. You try to look, not look at the computer or the home office, but it just going four or five hours without seeing any notifications makes you want to check in. And that’s just a natural, you start falling in love with your business. You want to check it on a 24 seven.

Andrew: You know, no matter how busy it is, you, you, you mentioned important thing.

Andrew: You guys love it. You guys genuinely love doing this.

Afro Hair Studio: Always, it’s so good.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s such a good feeling to, it’s always a good feeling.

Afro Hair Studio: Like me and Jacob always have had an amazing time just talking to people, interactions with customers.

Afro Hair Studio: Like we’ve always loved being in like a social environment.

Afro Hair Studio: So for us, it’s always a good time.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s always a good time.

Afro Hair Studio: We always love being at the salon.

Afro Hair Studio: And obviously we love helping people.

Afro Hair Studio: The feeling you get after you help a customer, it’s just the best feeling in the world.

Afro Hair Studio: Every single customer we talk to, we always have genuine conversations.

Afro Hair Studio: We genuinely are trying to help them.

Afro Hair Studio: We never have it in our mind thinking, oh, how can we make money off this person?

Afro Hair Studio: No, we don’t care if we could have made a ton of money off of somebody or not.

Afro Hair Studio: At the end of the day, we just wanna solve that person’s problem.

Afro Hair Studio: And if we solve, if we get them to leave happy, that’s all we genuinely care about.

Afro Hair Studio: And what we’ve noticed through the years is if you genuinely have that mindset of, you want what’s best for your clients and you want them to be happy, it’s gonna pay off for you.

Afro Hair Studio: So, but it’s just all about being genuine with it.

Afro Hair Studio: We love helping people out.

Andrew: Would you say that genuine desire of wanting to help people and wanting to solve problems is the biggest contributor to how successful Afro Hair Studio is?

Afro Hair Studio: A thousand percent, a thousand percent.

Afro Hair Studio: And here we are, downtown.

Andrew: Afro Hair Studios.

Andrew: Look at those LED lights.

Afro Hair Studio: I don’t know if you noticed, but we love LED lights.

Afro Hair Studio: Wig Wonders and downtown and Commercial Drive, all LED lights.

Andrew: Locks.

(coins clinking)

Afro Hair Studio: You can’t be too careful.

Andrew: Can’t be too careful.

Afro Hair Studio: Can never be too careful.

(phone ringing)

Andrew: Okay, we’re here at the second location.

Afro Hair Studio: Made it.

Andrew: So like you said, this is because you guys just saw so much demand, like so many customers, and that’s why it caused, I mean, that’s why you guys opened the second location, right?

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew: The flagship?

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, this is the flagship location.

Afro Hair Studio: This is the, we’ll call it the flagship.

Andrew: It’s much bigger.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s a lot bigger.

Andrew: It’s like triple the size?

Afro Hair Studio: It’s about a little over double.

Andrew: A little over double.

Afro Hair Studio: Oh yeah, probably close to a triple.

Andrew: I’m just eyeballing this.

Afro Hair Studio: It feels like it.

Afro Hair Studio: And about double the amount of stations.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s in a great location, right?

Afro Hair Studio: Right on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver.

Andrew: Wow, okay.

Andrew: Now with your clients, is it like a repeat client business?

Andrew: Like do you find–

Afro Hair Studio: Absolutely.

Andrew: Right, and like what percentage of that is repeat?

Andrew: What percentage of that is new clients?

Afro Hair Studio: I would say 80% are repeat clients.

Afro Hair Studio: Maybe even 90. Yeah, we have a lot of we have clients so a lot of the clients that we that we have it’s hard to say but we probably say somewhere around 80% of our clients are returning clients.

Afro Hair Studio: So most of the time if we have a client come in here once especially if they’re from the city So we have a lot of clients that are from outside visiting and they come in But if we’re talking about our local clients When our clients come in usually if they’re coming in for their first appointment 99% of the time they’re gonna keep returning. So that’s kind of why we keep growing It’s a client comes in anytime we get new clients, which is very often on a daily basis We’ll have new clients.

Andrew: And that’s because of that really good service like you mentioned good service

Afro Hair Studio: We try to have the best customer service. We try to always make sure whenever you’re coming in for your first experience it’s the best. We do free consultations so you can sit down like with a stylist get your hair checked. So we try to make it as convenient as possible.

Andrew: 80 to 90 percent is repeat customers. You must have built like some kind of community then I would imagine because yeah, so how often did they come back?

Afro Hair Studio: I would say so the average, the average hair service will last from two weeks to a month. But what we’ll see some clients who are in the film industry or who are on the white caps or professional athletes, musicians and they want to look sharp every single day. And so they’ll even come back every three days to every to a week.

Afro Hair Studio: So I’m doing the same style so some people we see weekly. And that’s another reason why we have such a close relationship with some of our customers. You see we have a lot of customers that are very close with us. Like they finish an appointment and we might go grab a bite with them.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, so there’s a we have a lot of clients like that just because they come so often depending on what service.

Andrew: Like I feel like that’s more unique to a salon business because most businesses don’t have r2epeat customers for like every week for some more.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, exactly. And that’s like restaurants. People try to eat out every single night different places. They’re not eating at the same place.

Afro Hair Studio: Ideally, sometimes you grocery shop at a grocery store that’s right beside your home.

Afro Hair Studio: But in that case, as far as a small family business or any small to medium sized business, it’s a blessing to be able to see recurring customers.

Afro Hair Studio: But I think the key things to that is you have to focus on quality over quantity first so that you have quality returning over and over again.

Andrew: So I see a lot of wigs.

Andrew: And I just have to ask, like, which one’s for you?

Andrew: Which one’s for me?

Afro Hair Studio: That one right there.

Afro Hair Studio: Okay, okay.

Afro Hair Studio: If we can pick a wig, can we pick the wig, please?

Andrew: Pick the wig.

Andrew: Give me that full consultation.

Afro Hair Studio: So, ideally, let’s say Andrew was our daily client for a wig, for example.

Afro Hair Studio: Or our daily, there’s somebody who, no, like a daily person that we see.

Andrew: Okay.

Afro Hair Studio: Let’s say Andrew was…

Afro Hair Studio: No one of you guys has said that.

Afro Hair Studio: So, we’re going to pretend that Andrew is another client that would walk in to our salon and just say, “Hey, I want a wig.

Afro Hair Studio: I don’t know what type of wig I want.

Afro Hair Studio: I don’t know the details of it, but I’ll give you what I had in mind.” And then we just help you along from there.

Afro Hair Studio: So if Andrew was saying that, “I just want a different look.

Afro Hair Studio: I don’t know much about wigs.” The first thing we would say is, “We’re going to offer you a free consultation.

Afro Hair Studio: You can sit down with one of our stylists and we’ll see what you do on a daily basis.

Afro Hair Studio: If you’re very active, non-active, what you’re going to be doing while wearing the wig, and get an idea of what you’re gonna use so we can recommend the right wig for you.

Afro Hair Studio: And so we’ll consult you through that.

Afro Hair Studio: So why don’t you sit down for your free consultation.

Andrew: All right.

Afro Hair Studio: Please take a seat over here.

Andrew: Could I, do they ever go like, dealer’s choice, you just pick for me?

Afro Hair Studio: (laughing)

Afro Hair Studio: I’ve seen that before.

Afro Hair Studio: There’s been a couple of times where people are like, you know what, you just choose the wig out.

Afro Hair Studio: Don’t make it anything ridiculous, you just pick it out.

Afro Hair Studio: And I’m like, I mean, if you’re that chill, if you’re that calm about it, then that’s fine.

Afro Hair Studio: Usually they’ll walk through here, they’ll find something they like.

Afro Hair Studio: We pick it up for them, we’ll bring it here for them.

Afro Hair Studio: And they’ll try it on and they try the wig on.

Afro Hair Studio: Today, we’re just gonna pick out what we like.

Andrew: Okay, go ahead.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s gonna be more fun.

Afro Hair Studio: Okay, let’s do this.

Afro Hair Studio: So today you don’t get a choice.

Afro Hair Studio: We make the choice.

Afro Hair Studio: (laughing)

Afro Hair Studio: What should we pick?

Afro Hair Studio: Yo, Andrew, this is gonna be so funny, bro.

Afro Hair Studio: I’m dead.

Afro Hair Studio: This is actually gonna be comedy.

Afro Hair Studio: Isaac, wait.

Andrew: I don’t know why I’m kinda nervous, even though it is a wig.

Afro Hair Studio: Oh, this is gonna be so funny.

Afro Hair Studio: Where did they, oh.

Andrew: This is the treatment that got them to seven figures. This is it the service.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s okay. This one’s unworn. It’s fine He could just put it straight on it’s fine. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve found a wig that I’m hiding behind over here Okay, for Andrew

Andrew: Should I close my eyes?

Afro Hair Studio: You should close your eyes and close his eyes. Okay, and I will show you the wig but you guys can’t react. I don’t want Andrew to know

Andrew: Yeah, I’m like kind of nervous

Afro Hair Studio: Close your eyes.

Andrew: What’d you get me bro?

Afro Hair Studio: Close your eyes.

Andrew: Should I take my glasses off.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, take your glasses off.

Andrew: Okay, I’ve never gotten a wig before.

Afro Hair Studio: This is an unformal way of putting it on.

Andrew: But this is what people do. This is what you do. You just put it on like that. Tell me when to open.

Afro Hair Studio: Wait one second. Yeah, that’s it. That’s crazy okay. Y2ou can open your eyes now

Afro Hair Studio: Oh my god, my brother, that’s my brother right there.

Andrew: Yeah, do I get the pass?

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, you get more than the pass, bro.

Afro Hair Studio: You’re giving out the pass, bro.

Afro Hair Studio: Are you kidding me?

Andrew: This is amazing.

Andrew: Uncle Drew.

Afro Hair Studio: And the cool thing with something like this is you can wear it like this, or you can cornrow it back and do braids like you’ve seen in our vlog from last year.

Afro Hair Studio: This is what we’d call a disco party wig.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

Afro Hair Studio: This is next level.

Afro Hair Studio: see on Halloween months, you know what I mean?

Afro Hair Studio: But it’s a fun one, we like to keep it in the store.

Afro Hair Studio: See stuff like this, people will come in and they’ll just be spontaneous and they’ll just wanna try it on.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, yeah. – And have fun with it.

Afro Hair Studio: They’ll take photos with their friends, we like it.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s always a good time.

Andrew: You ever get an Asian guy come in and ask for this?

Afro Hair Studio: Bro, we’ve had–

Afro Hair Studio: We’ve turned Asian hair, like natural Asian hair, into this. – Yeah.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s called an Afro perm.

Afro Hair Studio: You perm the hair multiple times and it’s a specific– – But coming into straight hair– – Your straight hair into this.

Afro Hair Studio: And your straight hair has to get really long.

Afro Hair Studio: Like it’s grown out long. Because remember curls go in. Like my hair looks like this, but it’s actually it’s actually very very like yeah longer.

Andrew: Okay, let’s continue the rest of the interview yeah, I guess

Afro Hair Studio: Andrew you look so sick. You handsome devil.

Andrew: So let’s talk about staffing I’m curious in terms of like how do you guys Do your hires what’s training like is there something specific when you look for new hires?

Afro Hair Studio: Yes, so stylists need to be a lot very experienced obviously especially at our salon I know there’s other salons where you don’t need that much experience if you’re good at one thing like maybe a certain treatment or coloring hair. Yeah, you’re okay. Maybe they just hire you for that. But here we we see so many different styles every single day and there’s so many clients. We need somebody who we need stylists who can really do everything. As far as training, once a stylist comes in and is able to show us that they have a bit of a resume of being able to do stuff, or they can show us that they can do stuff comfortably, we make sure their personality fits in the salon.

Afro Hair Studio: Our salon’s vibe and the energy in here is very different from your average salon.

Afro Hair Studio: There’s music, people are coming in with food and talking and friends, and it’s just an environment where people, even when they’re done with their hair, they don’t want to leave.

Afro Hair Studio: They just want to hang out in here. We’re walking sporting events and whatnot, so we need stylists who love that environment who love interacting with people.

Afro Hair Studio: We’ve hired many employees through the years just because they’ve had such amazing energy. Maybe even there there may have even been other stylists that are better, but their energy is not as good. But you know if we find somebody with a great energy, great spirits when they come into work and they’re making the environment better for Everybody we’re willing to go off of the potential that you have. Train you to become better because like I said it’s family with the employees.

Andrew: Just the attitude is more important.

Afro Hair Studio: Exactly.

Afro Hair Studio: And it’s just a vibe of the salon.

Andrew: So would you say people pretty much love working here?

Afro Hair Studio: Oh, absolutely.

Andrew: If I were to ask one of your…

Afro Hair Studio: Yes, in our opinion, in our humble opinion, we always have a great experience from our employees.

Afro Hair Studio: And it’s one of those places where once they start working here, if they’ve worked at other salons, they’re pretty speechless.

Afro Hair Studio: Like the vibe here is amazing.

Afro Hair Studio: I guarantee if you come here on a Friday or Saturday night, anytime after like eight o’clock, it’s a party.

Afro Hair Studio: The music’s really on.

Afro Hair Studio: Our employees are just having a good time.

Afro Hair Studio: We’re eating food.

Afro Hair Studio: We’re just always spending pretty much every weekend night together.

Afro Hair Studio: We spend together.

Andrew: Employees are family, your customers are family.

Afro Hair Studio: Everything’s family.

Andrew: Now, when it comes to like hairstyles, how does that work?

Andrew: Is that, do they get their own chair or is it like salary?

Afro Hair Studio: So at the moment, we’re a bit different, our salon.

Afro Hair Studio: Most salons are disconnected from their employees because each employee kind of acts as their own business where they do commission or they rent chairs.

Afro Hair Studio: Our salon, because when we started it was a really niche, our stylists that really wanted to work with us, but they weren’t able to build their own clientele on their own, so they always wanted to be employees.

Afro Hair Studio: So we started off as employees.

Afro Hair Studio: So all of our stylists became employees.

Afro Hair Studio: So they would have an hourly wage, whatever it was, 19, $20, whatever it was.

Afro Hair Studio: They would have their hourly wage and then they would have tips like any salon.

Afro Hair Studio: They have their tips from clients, customers and that goes directly to them.

Afro Hair Studio: So there’s always a high margin ’cause the more clients you can work through and the more happy they are and satisfied they are with your service, they tip our stylist and we were super happy about that.

Afro Hair Studio: And so that’s, we’ve always been employee, sorry, yeah, employee-based, hourly-based.

Afro Hair Studio: And it’s really beneficial when it’s like that because like we said, we want all of our employees to get along and we like to keep a family and everyone together.

Afro Hair Studio: When a lot of hair salons that you see, the problem is either they’re doing commission or they’re doing, they’re renting chairs And there can be a lot of conflict between stylists because they’re trying to get as many clients as they can.

Afro Hair Studio: And in between that, there can be a lot of conflict because they’re, in a sense, they’re running their own business.

Afro Hair Studio: Here, we do hourly, and we try to make sure our employees are well taken care of.

Afro Hair Studio: And that way, nobody’s competing.

Afro Hair Studio: Everyone’s actually just helping each other out.

Andrew: Last few questions.

Andrew: If someone’s watching this right now, and they’re like, “Oh my God, I wanna start a salon.” – Yes.

Andrew: This is awesome.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah.

Andrew: What advice would you tell them?

Afro Hair Studio: Like any business, the most basic advice we could give or I could give is play the long game.

Afro Hair Studio: Don’t go into it for money at the beginning.

Afro Hair Studio: Go in to build your name and to build your business name.

Afro Hair Studio: Once you build your name and your business’s name, people wanna come to your business for you and anywhere you go, anywhere in the world, you’ve built your own name, you’ve built your own brand and it’ll become something that people wanna come and be a part of.

Afro Hair Studio: So don’t focus on the money.

Afro Hair Studio: If you’re money driven at the beginning, you’ll oversee the quality.

Afro Hair Studio: You’ll just see the quantity of money you can make, the quantity of clients you can get.

Afro Hair Studio: If you’re looking at the quality from the beginning, that’s the most important thing in any business, especially in the hair salon business.

Afro Hair Studio: Look at the quality that you can give to every individual person, and they’ll never stop coming back to you.

Afro Hair Studio: That’s the advice I give you.

Andrew: That’s how you can stay open for 26 years.

Afro Hair Studio: Yeah, and I would say, definitely you have to love it.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s so much work, it’s a lot of hard work.

Andrew: It’s like that cliche, but it’s true.

Afro Hair Studio: You have to love it because it is just so much work.

Afro Hair Studio: You have to love the business and you have to love being in social settings because that is 99% of what it’s gonna be.

Afro Hair Studio: It’s gonna be hard work and it’s gonna be a lot of social settings where you’ll be talking to people.

Afro Hair Studio: So you have to make sure you love what you’re doing.

Afro Hair Studio: You’re going into it and you have to know, you have to really be passionate about it.

Afro Hair Studio: You have to be passionate about it for sure.

Andrew: And the last question.

Andrew: What question would you wanna ask the next business owner that I interview?

Afro Hair Studio: I think a question I would ask myself, so I wanna ask other business owners is, if you had an extra $5,000, five to 10,000, that you can invest back into your business every month, where would it be or what would it go to?

Afro Hair Studio: I always ask myself that question, would it be back to adding one or two more staff or renovating something in the salon or adding it to the online marketing something?

Afro Hair Studio: That’s my question, where would your next $5,000 to $10,000 go monthly in your business?

Andrew: That’s a good question.

Andrew: All right, there you go.

Andrew: We’ll see who answers that in the next video.

Andrew: Okay, thank you guys.

Afro Hair Studio: Thank you.

Andrew: That’s good. – Thank you, sir.

Andrew: That was very good.

Afro Hair Studio: I love your hair.

Andrew: No, I love this hair.

Andrew: Thank you.

Andrew: Okay, that’s it.

Andrew: Make sure to subscribe, obviously.

Andrew: Hit the like button.

Afro Hair Studio: And check us out on Abraham Twins across all platforms.

Andrew: Yes.

Afro Hair Studio: And afrohairstudio.com.

Andrew: There you go, we’ll link it down below.

Afro Hair Studio: Awesome.

Andrew: Okay?

Andrew: And yeah, that’s it.

Andrew: See you guys in the next one.

Afro Hair Studio: Successful.