ABOUT ME · SINCE 2019
My story,
continued.
A lot has happened since we last caught up.
By the end of 2019, I was on a roll in San Francisco. Allure happened, then Modern Salon, then InTouch, three magazine features over the course of roughly six months. I was turning away a ridiculous amount of business because I simply could not keep up with the inquiries. I had spent years building a clientele that trusted me, and suddenly I was beginning to figure out what expansion might mean in a way that still felt comfortable and true to me.
At the same time, I had built a rental property business on the side. When you work for yourself, no one hands you benefits, assets, or equity; I knew I had to create those things for myself. That business was going well too, and I was starting to think about expanding it. I am so grateful both expansion plans were taking their sweet time, because in March of 2020, COVID reared its ugly head and stopped everything in its tracks.
Allure. Modern Salon. InTouch.
Three features. Six months.
I remember working in my Financial District suite and looking down onto Montgomery Street. It was deserted in a way I never thought I would see. At first, I had an influx of clients telling me they could come at any time because they were suddenly working from home. For about two full weeks, I honestly thought I might be pandemic proof. For the first time, everyone did not need a 5:00 p.m. appointment. I was catching the early ferry home and occasionally stopping for a glass of wine at a cafe along the Embarcadero, where it seemed to be only me and the bartender. For a brief moment, I thought I had found work life balance in the strangest possible way.
Then I began to understand how disastrous this was going to be for every kind of business, including mine. In a place like San Francisco, businesses feed one another. When the offices emptied, everything around them did too. I will never forget my last ferry ride home from work, watching the sun set over the city from the water and not realizing it was the last time life as I knew it would look exactly that way.
San Francisco, from the water.
Standing in my living room on March 17 and hearing that all in person business had to stop changed my life. It was supposed to be for two weeks, or so we all thought. I spent days moving weeks of appointments, only to move them again and again as the stay at home orders kept extending. People were dying. Everything felt frightening and uncertain, and months went by that way.
It took nearly two months for self employed people to gain access to the unemployment portal. I remember waking up at 5:00 a.m. to apply because the website would crash under the number of people trying to get through. My bank account became frighteningly quiet. I kept paying half rent on my studio for months, hoping there would be a clear path back, while also trying to understand what would happen to the rental property business I had built.
While I was trying to figure out how to keep my own business alive, I was also trying to keep roofs over two other families while feeling unsure about the future of the one over my own. I was incredibly fortunate that my tenants continued paying throughout the pandemic. Other hairdresser friends were not so lucky. Some spent years in eviction proceedings while carrying multiple mortgages and being unable to work themselves. I have never forgotten how easily any of us could have found ourselves on the other side of that story.
Then my neighbor, who was also a hairdresser, offered me one day a week in the unfinished ADU in her backyard that she had quietly turned into a salon. I could finally help clients who were absolutely desperate to have their extensions removed or refreshed. It was only one day because she was trying to do the exact same thing, but it gave me a bridge when I desperately needed one.
I think it was the morning after I cleared out my San Francisco studio and handed the keys back to my landlord that I woke up and decided I was done living in limbo.
I walked into the laundry room in our Alameda garage, pushed the washer and dryer out, and basically said, "Fuck it."
I painted the entire room, drilled a shampoo sink into the wall, and had it drain into an empty kitty litter bucket. Voila: I had a salon. It was makeshift and wildly imperfect, but it was mine, and it worked. For a while, that little room let me keep serving clients and keep moving when there was no real road map for what came next.
The laundry room in our Alameda garage, becoming a salon.
Eventually, I started asking myself whether San Francisco was still where I wanted to be. The clientele I had spent more than a decade building was moving in every direction. Nothing felt certain. And I finally thought: if everyone else is moving, why not me?
Back behind the chair, wherever that chair happened to be.
I decided to take a risk and open back home. Contra Costa County was allowed to reopen while San Francisco remained closed for months, so I moved into a room inside a good friend's salon. The first night I saw the space, I told Danny to get the hammer out of the car. I immediately started breaking down a temporary wall and trying to envision what the room could become.
A hammer, a temporary wall, and a room I could see the possibilities in.
Danny and I painted through power outages and one of the worst fire seasons we had ever experienced. We hauled demolition to the dumpster wearing N95 masks, covered in dust, because the air outside was almost as difficult as the uncertainty around us. I just kept pushing. I designed the room to be exactly what I wanted, and I believed the people would come. They did.
There was one more strange full circle moment in that transition. The unfinished ADU that had temporarily kept me working later became our temporary home for three months. We wanted to give our Danville tenants time to find other housing before we moved in, so Danny and I waited in the same little space that had already served as a salon. It was humbling, imperfect, and also a reminder of how many different forms "home" and "work" had taken in such a short period of time.
A PROUD MILESTONE
A bright spot in 2020
Amid all that change, 2020 brought a bright spot worth celebrating. I had applied to trademark my business name, The Hair Extensions Expert, in 2019, and it was officially approved without opposition the following year. At a time when so much felt uncertain, that milestone gave me a moment to appreciate what I had built and everything I was still working toward.
I rebuilt an even more successful book of business on the back of a global pandemic, exactly where I wanted to be. The way my career brought me back home, to the place where it had started, still leaves me in awe. I thought that might have been the biggest rebuilding season of my life. I did not yet know life was going to ask me to rebuild in an entirely different way.
When I became pregnant with Banks, I developed carpal tunnel in both hands at seventeen weeks. It lasted through thirty nine weeks. For someone whose entire livelihood depends on her hands, it was terrifying and incredibly painful. My fingers were swollen, numb, and often braced, and I still stood behind the chair doing the precise work my clients trusted me to do. The finished hair looked polished. The hands creating it did not feel that way.
The hands behind the finished hair.
Banks was born by C section, and I went back to work four weeks later. My body was still healing from major surgery, I was battling postpartum depression, and Danny was unemployed during the first two years of our son's life. Getting out of bed through the physical pain and the emotional weight of that season made for some of the hardest days I have ever lived.
I am endlessly grateful for the clients who understood when it took every ounce of me simply to be there. They knew when I was not up for talking. They gave me quiet, grace, and continued support. They kept supporting my small business while I was learning how to be a mother, how to keep working, and how to recognize myself again.
Becoming a mother. Finding my way through.
Returning to work was not a neat, triumphant bounce back. It happened one appointment, one day, and sometimes one hour at a time. But little by little, I began rebuilding both myself and the business. I started getting my pink back.
After Banks was born, I realized I needed more space for the version of the business I was rebuilding. I found the most perfect larger two chair suite across the street in Alamo and designed it to hold what came next: two chairs, thoughtful storage, a full wall of extensions, and the national magazine features framed on the wall.
Opening that space became part of returning to work and rebuilding myself. It was not simply an upgrade or a prettier room. It was physical evidence that I was still here, that the business and the woman behind it could change shape again without disappearing.
Seven months after I opened that space, Cosmopolitan became my fourth national feature. The timing felt almost impossible: after everything that had happened, another full circle moment arrived in the room I had built during one of the most vulnerable seasons of my life.
Cosmopolitan, seven months after opening the larger space.
Now my son gets to grow up watching what it looks like to show up, work hard, get your hands dirty, and build something you believe in. I am proud that he will know the glamorous photographs were never the whole story. Behind them were early mornings, long days, physical pain, fear, reinvention, and a mother who kept going even when she did not feel like herself.
My son is watching me build this.
Sometimes the universe truly has a way of leading you back home and placing you exactly where you are supposed to be. The common thread through all of it has been simple: keep pushing. Success never happens in a straight line.
Most days, I have been covered in dust, paint, hair color, or all three. Despite how glamorous this job can look from the outside, I never would have survived, or made it this far, if I had not been willing to knock down a wall in a dress and sandals, get covered in dust, and then get back behind the chair.
My clients have watched every version of this business, and many of them have watched every version of me. They knew when it took everything I had to show up, and they are still here as I find my way back to myself. I will never take that kind of support for granted. It is woven into this story, into this business, and into the life I am so proud to be building.
A few reminders of how far this journey has taken me.
With love,