What it’s like to reopen a Newbury Street hair salon during the coronavirus pandemic
Wildflower Hair Studio co-owners, Cole Flynn and Victoria Millsap, are taking temperatures at the door.
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On March 17, Cole Flynn and Victoria Millsap, celebrated one year since opening their salon, Wildflower Hair Studio. Six days later, they shut their doors due to the coronavirus outbreak. As part of Phase 1 of the state’s reopening plan, the studio began serving customers again for the first time last week. Their studio, which is located on the second floor of 207 Newbury St., was not damaged in the violence that followed Sunday’s peaceful protests for George Floyd. Boston.com caught up with Flynn and Millsap before Sunday’s protests, and the co-owners shared what it’s like to run a salon business during a pandemic.
Q: What was going through your mind when you had to close Wildflower Hair Studio back in March?
Millsap: It was very scary and surreal, and we definitely had those fears of what this is going to do to our business. It’s hard as a business in general to survive your first year — they say the first five years are the hardest, so if you can make it through your first year then your chances [of succeeding] are a lot higher. And then as our first year hit, this all happened.
Victoria Millsap and Cole Flynn, co-owners of Wildflower Hair Studio.
Q: How have you been keeping the business afloat over the past few months?
Flynn: Our friends, family, and clients all rallied behind us with a GoFundMe that we had set up to help kind of pay the rent while we couldn’t be making money ourselves. That really helped us to kind of have a little bit of a safety net. We didn’t actually qualify for a lot of the small business loans, so that was kind of painful to go through and try to navigate. And that wasn’t very easy to try [figure it out] ourselves, but our accountant was really kind and really helped us apply for what we could apply for.
Millsap: We’re business owners, we’re self-employed, and our renters are self-employed as well. It was really hard to figure out how everything was going to get paid, and our rent is not cheap being on Newbury Street. Thankfully they did put a hold on our rent, but we weren’t able to get any unemployment [benefits] until about like six or seven weeks in.
Flynn: So we raised [through GoFundMe] just over $2,000, which has helped us tremendously with all the PPE that we’ve had to order…getting PPE was probably one of the most stressful things about reopening. Everybody was scrambling — things were out of stock or just insanely priced, or you wouldn’t be able to get them until like a month after you opened. We ended up getting really lucky and weaving through all these companies to be able to get the stuff on time, but without that money that we had in the GoFundMe, I don’t know if that would have been possible.
Q: How do you feel about being back at work?
Millsap: It’s terrifying. We kind of felt like we were between a rock and a hard place. Do you stay home and stay safe? Do you go back to work after you know your clients have missed you and want their hair done? And then there’s this aspect of they say we ‘can’ go back to work so that means our landlord expects rent. Do you choose to stay home and stay safe, or pay the bills? It’s a really hard place to be…I was terrified my first day going back, and then after my first client I was like, ‘Okay, this isn’t as scary, isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.’ But it is still very new.
Flynn: I was definitely terrified. I called my doctor a handful of times [before returning to work] just being pregnant. The unknown of like, is it worth it for me to go in? Am I safe? Can I trust [clients] in this phase to all be on the same page?…It kind of felt like you’re forced to make that choice: Are you going to give up on your business and watch it collapse, or are you going to strap on all this PPE and get to work, and hope and pray that it works out?…But wearing the mask, wearing the goggles, wearing the smock — all the steps that we take made me feel a lot better. It’s a lot to do, but does offer some security, knowing that you’re doing everything you can to keep you and your clients safe.
Q: Has the coronavirus kept customers away now that you’ve reopened?
Millsap: We’re both booked out until July. Clients are ready to come back in.
Q: What should someone expect to experience at your salon right now?
Millsap: We have our fresh masks on, our gloves, our goggles — everything is switched [from the last customer]. We take everything off [after the customer leaves], disinfect everything, and then put on fresh [PPE] again. We ask you to call first. We can let you know we’re ready and everything’s sanitized, and then when you come to the door we will bring you in.
We take your temperature — we have to write down your name, your number, and your temperature, just in case if anything was to happen we have like a backlog to give to the proper people who then would inform anybody that they were exposed, if that were to happen — and then we ask you to wash your hands. We make sure you’re wearing a mask, if you’re not wearing a mask we do provide you with one. We bring you over and we ask that you bring limited things — just your keys, your form of payment, and a beverage if you need it. Right now we’re not offering any coffees, tea, water — we cleaned out all nonessential stuff from the studio.
We’re just working one stylist, one at a time, which is tough because we have five stylists in our studio and it’s a three-chair studio. So we’re all doing one day a week and then two days a week alternating, which is hard to fit everybody in and be on a limited schedule. After an appointment, we take everything off again, we sanitize, and then we get set up for the next one.
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