Dana White is the first black woman to franchise a national hair salon by opening Paralee Boyd, a salon dedicated to her grandmother and women with thick, curly hair in Detroit.
White launched a campaign that focused on going beyond your traditional hair salon after visiting a Dominican hair salon in New York City. Dana White stated that she made an appointment and cleared her entire Saturday because she expected to wait that long. “I walked in at 11 am, I was done by 12:30 pm and I couldn’t believe it,” White told Franchise Times. “I’ve learned by watching, you know what? There’s got to be a better way to do this. I just no longer have the time to sit in the salon for four to six hours.” Dana became focused on creating a solution to getting clients in and out of the salon in a timely manner. In your normal hair salon, clients can spend anywhere from three to six hours waiting to get their hair done, “Spending all day at a salon has been one of the biggest complaints from clients across the hair industry,” White told Forbes in an interview.
The Paralee Boyd salon operates from lean manufacturing tech principles inspired by the automotive industry that design a space for it to run more efficiently. Each station in the salon is closely measured to avoid any conflicts with efficiency. Records are kept from check-in to check-out to ensure that customers are taken care of in a timely manner. “We are very deliberate in the information in the data that we collect,” White told Forbes.
Dana White’s urge to create a space where women can feel good and have a pleasant experience all stems from her grandmother Paralee Boyd. Her grandmother grew up in Camp Branch, KY, and was the first generation to not work as a domestic for the Gilberts, the family that employed and enslaved her family since 1821. White states that her grandmother was “known in her community as someone everyone can talk to. Her ear and her kitchen were always open, and it was said that you always left her home feeling better than when you entered it,” White said on the salon’s website.
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