A 34-year-old salon owner moved to NYC as a teen to cut hair. She explains how she bootstrapped a one-chair salon out of a basement before expanding to 2 bustling Williamsburg locations.
Alisha Wetherill
- Martha Ellen Mabry moved to NYC at 18 for a six-month cosmetology program and never looked back.
- At 21, she bootstrapped Headchop, which started as a one-chair basement salon in Williamsburg.
- Over a decade later, after overcoming the pandemic and cancer, she opened a sibling salon, Lil' Chop.
- This article is part of "Unlocking Small Business Success," a series providing micro businesses with a road map to growth.
To step into Headchop Hair Studio is to step back in time.
Vintage chairs and eclectic wallpaper fill the space. There's an antique cash register and a white retro fridge with colorful alphabet magnets that spell out, "Chop it like iz hot."
The humble basement salon, sandwiched between residential buildings on Berry Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is easy to miss. Descending the stairs elicits a similar thrill to stumbling upon a speakeasy.
Roughly 10 New York City blocks and six-tenths of a mile away, you'll have an easier time finding Lil' Chop. It's a 3,000-square-foot modern salon with an open floor plan, skylight, and impressively large and healthy plants.
Alisha Wetherill
While the two salons don't share much aesthetically, they have the same owner: Martha Ellen Mabry, 34.
Her two studios are well within walking distance for a New Yorker, but Mabry prefers to commute back and forth in her blue Geo Tracker. It's a 1995 model with hand-crank windows and good trunk space for schlepping supplies between locations.
On the day of her interview with Business Insider, Headchop was closed for renovations. Mabry, the self-appointed contractor, had been up until 1 a.m. the previous night repainting the salon's interior with a friend.
Martha Ellen Mabry
"If I can do it myself, I'm doing it myself for sure," the business owner, whose original location began as a one-chair operation in 2011, said. She opened Lil' Chop, which she describes as the express version of Headchop, in 2023.
"I can paint the wall. I have a drill. I do pretty much all of our updates myself and only hire people when it's absolutely something I can't do," which isn't often, she said, adding: "That's the beauty of YouTube. If I don't know how to do it, I probably can figure it out."
From small-town South Carolina to 'ruthless' New York City: skipping college and moving at 18 to cut hair
Mabry grew up in a small town in South Carolina and would get her hair cut at a salon owned by one of her neighbors. She would flip through the lookbook for hairstyle inspiration and select "whatever I thought really stood out or was different," she said, adding: "I really used my hair growing up as a way to express myself."
Mabry remembers one day seeing the salon owner driving a new car. "It was a yellow T-Bird, a very cool-looking car," she said. Surprised, she asked her mom whether the stylist had a job outside cutting hair. "My mom was like, 'No, she does really well for herself. She just does hair.' And I was like, 'I'm going to do that.'"
Samuel Robert Bullen
Mabry's high school happened to partner with a nearby vocational school that offered various programs, including cosmetology. She enrolled and had a license to cut hair by the time she graduated from high school in 2007.
She planned to attend a community college close to home and study business. However, when one of her peers messaged her on Myspace asking whether she'd consider moving to NYC for a six-month hair and makeup program, Mabry put her plan on hold temporarily — or so she thought.
"I told myself, 'I'll go to New York. It'll be six months. I'll come back. I'll go to college a semester later,'" she said. That was nearly 17 years ago, and despite being greeted with a rental scam at her first apartment in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bed-Stuy, "I came here and never looked back," she added.
It helped that the South Carolina native anticipated the city would be "ruthless" — she had never been to New York. "I was expecting it to be everything I had never experienced, and it absolutely was," Mabry said.
Martha Ellen Mabry
During the six-month program, she learned the ins and outs of the industry, developed her technical skillset, practiced on her roommate's head of hair, and built a portfolio.
She took on freelance hair and makeup projects and started earning income, but "the money I was making was never going to cover rent," said Mabry, whose parents had agreed to help her with rent only during the program, which was coming to an end. "I wanted to stay here," she said. "I needed something stable, so I got a job in a salon."
Gaining experience at a salon before transitioning to working for herself
Thanks to a post on Craigslist, Mabry landed an interview and eventually a job at the curly-hair salon DevaChan. She worked her way up from her initial "salon assistant" job title to a hairstylist.
During her two years at DevaChan, she connected with Michelle Iorio, a stylist who owned a salon in upstate New York and persuaded Mabry to work with her on her off days. She worked seven days a week between both gigs until the workload and commute became unstainable. At that point, Mabry quit her DevaChan gig and committed four days a week to Iorio, who was also offering mentorship.
"She taught me everything I know about color and helped me home in on my skills with all hair types, not just curly. I started really perfecting my work with her," said Mabry, who also started seeing private clients in the city and styling their hair either in her apartment or theirs.
After about nine months of commuting upstate, Mabry felt equipped to work for herself full time. Plus, her boyfriend at the time owned a clothing line and suggested they lease a studio space together.
Clinton Van Gemert
In 2011, Headchop was born in a basement in Williamsburg.
Mabry's startup costs — her share of rent and supplies — were small, she said: "I never took out a loan. That place was completely made of found objects. I didn't buy anything new. All the chairs were vintage that I had gotten off Craigslist, or I'd find out about a salon closing and go over and get something."
From a one-chair show to taking over the entire space
Mabry's initial setup occupied a fraction of their 1,700-square-foot space.
"I started with one chair," she said. Her bookkeeping was just as simple. "I had a handwritten calendar," she added. "I had a list of my guaranteed clients — my people that were once a month, every six weeks, once every two months — and I knew I could just cover rent with that money. Everything else would feed me and help me to get by."
Operating out of a basement, "I wasn't really banking on walk-ins," she added. "But we made a presence," she said. "We had the music bumping. We would put signs out encouraging people to come down. It was very artist vibes, which was the draw in the beginning. It didn't necessarily draw your high-ticket client; we were drawing the artistic, creative Williamsburg-type, so it really worked."
Alisha Wetherill
It wasn't long before Mabry needed a second chair — and another set of hands.
"That small change in professionalism from being a nomad to having a location made a big difference with business," she said. "All of a sudden, I'm back-to-back with haircuts, the phone's ringing, and I'm taking messages."
She hired an assistant in year one and expanded to three chairs in year two. By 2014, she had five chairs. In 2016, her salon occupied the entire basement space.
It was organic, word-of-mouth growth from the beginning, Mabry, who didn't spend a dime on marketing and was careful to hire only when necessary, said. That helped her bottom line. "Financially, it was going well," she said. "I never found myself worried. What was not going well was that I wasn't keeping track. And I didn't have a separate business account, so everything was going into my personal account."
Hayley Carloni
As her number of clients and employees grew, she came to terms with the fact that she needed to update her "old-school" systems to keep up with the growth. She shifted from handwritten appointments to an online booking system in 2016 and streamlined her payroll process.
"Looking back, I was not prepared. I didn't go to business school," Mabry, who had hired an accountant from the beginning but learned nearly everything else through trial and error, said. "But I did know hair."
Overcoming COVID, then cancer — and opening a sibling location in 2023
Mabry thought about opening her second location for years. But because she was a small-business owner running a lean operation, "it always would be two steps forward, three steps back," she said. "The business would be booming, and I'd be like, all right, I need to step back and not be behind the chair as much so I can think about another location," she added. "As soon as I would step back, I'd lose a stylist and have to pick up that work."
And then 2020 threw two major curveballs: the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted operations between March and June, and a major health scare.
"I knew something was wrong and was hearing from the doctors, 'It looks like cancer,'" Mabry said. "I was officially diagnosed in December but had to stop working fully in October. I was going to so many appointments."
She did four months of chemotherapy starting in January 2021.
The silver lining was that it forced her to take a step back. She couldn't work behind the chair during chemo — and her business was unaffected.
"The salon was doing fine, generating the money it should. It didn't need me to support it in that way," Mabry, who returned to work in May with a renewed focus, said. "I saw a lot of things clearly that I had not seen before because I didn't have the capacity to pay attention to them. I really got into growth mode."
Hayley Carloni
She started looking at spaces for a second salon in 2022, secured a $50,000 loan, and signed a lease in August. Lil' Chop opened on January 31, 2023. She'd hoped to get a loan closer to $100,000, she said, "so I also self-funded and took on credit cards."
Owning and operating two locations is part exciting and part terrifying.
"Since opening the new salon, for the first time in my career, I've officially felt the fear and the terror of, 'What have I done?'" Mabry, who manages six full-time and three part-time employees, said. "From the beginning, I never thought about it as, 'Oh, I'm opening a business.' I looked at opening Headchop as, 'I am getting a space — a personal private studio to see my clients.'"
One of her fears is that growth could mean sacrificing the level of quality she's maintained for more than a decade and has helped get her to where she is.
"What makes a business truly work for a long time is the care that goes into it," Mabry said. "You have to care as an employer — about your employees and your clients and everyone's experience. The experience all around is No. 1, along with the quality of the work."
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