Lofty offers professional hair color and design. We are the home of Curlyologist: the curly hair expe I am often asked what Lofty means.
The answer to that is quite a story. Please read on as I recount it for you. From the beginning, I have been a hair designer with a vivid imagination. When I started over 30 years ago, I would spend my spare time between clients daydreaming about one day owning my own salon. I envisioned how it would look, both inside and out, and I even visualized myself planting flowers in front of my shop. Rema
rkably, one day I happened to run across a sad, neglected building in a great location with plenty of parking. Immediately I began to see my vision of a hair salon. My quest to lease the building started a chain of events that would ultimately take a year to complete. When I contacted the owner, Joe, he agreed to show me the space, but only the second floor. As he opened the door, we were greeted by hopping crickets. There were so many, they needed a traffic light. Joe passed it off by saying that the second floor had been vacant for a few years.
“By the way, what are you going to do with the building?” he asked. What I had in mind was to fix up the salon on the first floor and rent the upstairs. However, I blurted out that I wanted to make the second floor into a wellness center. I surprised myself by saying this because I had never really thought about it before. Given the layout of the rooms, it just made perfect sense to me. Anyway, we went back to Joe’s office and scheduled a meeting with his brother and co-owner two days later. I went home and talked with my husband about it that night. He told me I had nothing to lose. When I met with Joe and his brother, they agreed to lease the building to me for the next twenty years. A few months later, the leasing agent emailed me asking what I was going to call this “joint.” I replied, “Because it has two floors, I was thinking of The Beauty Loft.” He said, “Ohhh, so lofty!” Ironically, I liked his name better, so we started going back and forth using the name Lofty in our correspondence. Every time I opened my email and saw the name Lofty, it put a smile on my face. Then the time came to finalize everything. It occurred to me that if I was going to use this name, I had to find out precisely what it meant. So, I looked it up and found that it was exactly “me.”I had lots and lots of “lofty” dreams and not much money. Only $35,000 in savings, empty credit cards, and free rent for three months to get the building ready. So with my phone, a mirror, chair, and sink, I set to work while the construction was underway. What I earned on any given day, I spent on furniture and equipment. I bought one hair color at a time because I couldn’t afford to have a stock room. Slowly, slowly, I started growing and expanding. After 25 years of working for others, I finally had my own business! That was six years ago now and I feel that my “lofty dreams” have come true and are now a reality. Four years after opening Lofty Salon, I was brave enough to create Lofty Spa, totally transforming the “loft” upstairs, and two years after that, we opened our chic boutique downstairs alongside the salon. I am blessed with a wonderful staff, lots of wonderful guests and friends, and a great community that I am proud to be a part of. I hope you enjoyed reading my story and I hope it will inspire other women out there who love to dream like me. To them I say, “Go ahead and dream, you just never know.”
