My upbringing as the daughter of a diplomat father and a Turkish mother oscillated between exotic lands and Washington DC suburbs. High school took place in Ankara at a small international school before I settled in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains in Charlottesville, VA for eight years. At nineteen I was already part-owner in a collectively-owned restaurant near campus, regularly sitting through hours of tedious meetings and loving every moment of the taste of entrepreneurship. A few years later, I took what I’d learned and applied it to a business I founded with five other people after advertising the desire to start a collective. We opened a hostel and built a dormitory out of an old garage, with a total sleeping capacity of 14. It went on to thrive for years before Air bnb came along and the hostel closed its doors in 2012. The entire time I was working at these establishments among other restaurants, cafes, and a health food store, I was cutting hair. It was happening quietly on the side, but the number of clients was growing steadily. In high school, I couldn’t seem to stop giving myself every haircut and color you can imagine, and my friends began wanting them too. In college, when asked where I got my hair cut, I told them the truth, and they wanted haircuts too. When I moved 30 minutes away, people drove 30 minutes to get their hair cut. Eventually I had a three-week wait list and zero free time. I needed to make a decision. I’d been resistant to pursuing it as a career because I loved it so much and didn’t want to ruin it for myself, but there was no way around it. So I packed up my life and moved to NYC for beauty school.
SaLune is Hudson, NY’s new, much talked-about dry-cut hair salon. It evolved out of Hair de Lune, which was the name of my freelance hair styling business since 2010. It traveled back and forth between NYC and Virginia, where I rented chairs in salons, opened two private studios in my apartments in Brooklyn, and made house calls. Eventually, I worked full time for a wonderful salon in the city, but after five years of the NYC hustle and with prices in Brooklyn skyrocketing, I made for the hills and rode the trendy wave to the Hudson River Valley.
I’d visited Hudson a handful of times in 2015 and immediately saw the potential for a hip, urbane hair salon. The lack of a competing aesthetic and approach boosted my confidence and I opened SaLune in November, a one-chair, by-appointment start to my bigger vision. The response has been more enthusiastic and encouraging than I could have even hoped for. My approach to dry cutting was entirely self-taught, and is based on my assumption that most people would rather spend less time worrying about their hair and more time looking great. I’d found that this is possible if the hair is cut according to its own unique growth patterns, which can only be seen and worked with on dry hair. As long as people are willing to allow their hair to “do it’s own thing” by not interfering too much with heat styling tools, I will cut it to lay attractively without the need for much maintenance or fuss. So far, this idea, based on my own laziness with my hair, seems to be striking people as revolutionary and brilliant.
I have a stash of products I’ve bought for use on my clients as a finishing element to their hair service, but I have not had enough money to place a first-time order for products to sell retail, which costs $1,500.00. I have had countless people love the product I used on their hair, and I’ve actually had to send several people to a salon down the street to find something of similar quality. I will charge 200% of what I buy the products for, so ideally I will make $3,000 back. I expect them all to sell because I have narrowed my selection down to specific products that are appropriate for the local demographic based on conversations I’ve had with my clients over the past several months. The vast majority of my clients are women between the ages of 50 and 70, who are battling the onset of dramatically graying hair and need products to help tame and smooth the frizz that accompanies that phenomenon. I want to use only the highest quality of all-natural products made by Davines, an Italian company growing in popularity among high-end salons worldwide.