How To Create a Team-Atmosphere and a Sense of Community Inside of an Independent Salon.

By David Thurston - Owner & Founder of Danger Jones

Butterfly Loft is a 122-square-meter salon in Los Angeles that, thanks to social media, is one of the most well-known salons in the world. In November, Danger Jones will be celebrating its 14th anniversary. Butterfly Loft is much more than a business for the founders, David and Alexis Thurston (also the founders of the Danger Jones color brand that is available in Australia through Salon Cosmetics); they were actually married inside the salon, underneath a giant metal butterfly sculpture that hangs from the salon’s ceiling.

Butterfly Loft is an independent hair salon, full of 35 of LA’s most successful independent artists. We caught up with the founders to find out how they create a team atmosphere and a unique sense of community inside their salon when all of their hairdressers are independent artists.

In the founders’ words…

Because of technology, stylists can now book their own appointments, run their own credit cards, and market themselves on social media. In short, stylists have become far more independent than they used to. When this shift happened, many salon owners freaked out and decided to try and make stylists more dependent by creating an atmosphere designed to more closely control stylists, and it hasn’t worked out well for most of them.

When this independent movement started, it required us to look into the mirror and ask ourselves the question… how we can we make stylists more successful working with us as independent artists, than they could on their own? We concluded that there is a way of working that is even higher than independence, and we call this interdependence. This is win/win relationship structure where two or more people can work together and achieve greater success than they could on their own.

Choosing the Right People

If you’re going to create a community, you have to have the right people on board. When there is an open station, we prefer to fill it with home-grown talent by offering the station to one of our assistants, because they were raised inside our unique team culture.

But how can an artist graduate from being an assistant (without a lot of their own clients) to a full-time, station-renting stylist, without any step in between? To make this a possibility, we created what we call a Rent Escalation Program. We start them out at a low rental rate and every 3 months we raise their rent by a set amount. After 1.5 years of these rent increases, they’re at the same rental rate as everyone else.

By creating rent milestones from the beginning, the new stylist understands that if they go the extra mile, they can put more money into their pocket, and if they don’t work hard, they know they won’t be able to meet the next rent escalation milestone. When their rent goes up, they actually feel good about themselves, because they know they’ve graduated to the next level.

We feel the program provides just the right incentive, because we’ve had more than 30 stylists go through the program, and not one of them has ever failed. This program doesn’t just provide a pathway for stylists, and it doesn’t just keep our stations filled, but it also engenders a ton of loyalty from the stylists when they graduate from our program.

However, not all of our stylists are homegrown. From time to time, we hire artists who are interested in transferring to Butterfly Loft from a different salon. And this is where a lot of salon owners get it wrong. Because of financial pressure, many will fill a station with anyone willing to pay them a rent check. This short-term solution to financial pressure can frequently have long-term, negative ramifications. We’re huge believers in the old saying, a bad apple ruins the bunch.

When we hire from the outside, it’s critical that we don’t choose a bad apple. We owe it to our current stylists to make sure the incoming stylist contributes to our unique culture, not detracts from it. So, we require artists to audition for the position, by having them bring a client into our salon, where we watch them work for 3 hours, cutting and coloring hair.

During the audition, we’re closely monitoring how they interact with us, their client, and our artists. Auditioning is a two-way street, and we also encourage the artist to bring a friend or family member with them to the audition so the two of them can really assess us and our culture to see if it’s a good fit for them.

Making Them More Successful Than They Would Be on Their Own

Once you have the right people in place, our job is to find ways to make stylists more successful working with us than they would be on their own. One of the most effective ways we do this is through our social media account. By working with our artists, we have built our salon Instagram page to over 200,000 followers. Every day we highlight our artists on social media, which makes them more successful than they would be on their own, because it drives more clients into their chairs.

We also have events throughout the year, including an in-salon education program that gives our own artists an opportunity to educate and also brings in top educators from outside our salon to inspire and help level up our stylist’s skills. We also invest in two parties each year, one in July at our home, and the other as a big holiday party. Events help form friendships inside our salon, which is something they simply wouldn’t get if they worked on their own.

In an era where stylists are becoming more independent every day, we believe it’s a mistake to try and stick the toothpaste back in the tube. Instead, we lean in to the movement by choosing to be an independent salon, full of independent artists. To pull this off, we create a team atmosphere and sense of community by making sure we have the right people on the team, and then we create win-win, interdependent relationships with our artists to ensure that they’ll be more successful working with us than they would be on their own, creating a framework where our most important asset is valued above all… and that’s our culture.

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