A Good Hair Day

Making People Feel Great is Big Business for Paul Brown.

It will be a slightly disconcerting revelation to anyone who’s ever paid $100 to a stylist, but Hawaii’s Highness of Hair believes he can train almost anybody to give a good haircut. In the ego-driven kingdom of hairstyling, this might seem a more conceited claim than usual, except for the fact that genial, jocular Paul Brown, founder and owner of the hugely successful Paul Brown Salons and Day Spas, and arguably Hawaii’s best-known and bounciest hairstylist, can be forgiven a little hyperbole these days. Inside his Ward Center and Waikele Shopping Center salons, business is grand and glamour is king, testimonials in equal measure, one can suppose, to Brown’s winning entrepreneurial formulas (Brown expects to do $6 million in gross revenue this year, not including hair care and beauty products), and to the fact that hair needs help in good times and bad.

Paul Brown, Hawaii's most successful stylist/businessman, has good reason to smile.

On a visit to the salon last June, there were crowds of joyful people waiting to be clipped and styled and plucked and pampered. You could feel the buzz, as they say, a good deal of it generated by Brown, an exultant, effervescent man, as he wandered the salon, bantering with his loyal, eager staff of stylists. “Ninety percent of this business is the way people feel,” he notes with a burst of enthusiasm, “I love what I do, and I love people, and I want them to feel good.”

How well they feel as they fork over Hawaii’s highest styling fees (Brown charges $100 for a haircut and still works four days a week with as many as 30 clients; his top assistant and training director Catherine Acena will cut your hair for $85) can be judged by current statistics that indicate his two Honolulu salons (another opened in December at the Hapuna Prince Beach Hotel on the Big Island) are, by square foot of operation, more profitable than 99 percent of hair salons in the U.S.

Only two other salons — both in San Francisco — can compare, Brown says. Recently, a leading styling trade magazine named the Paul Brown Salon & Day Spas among the 200 fastest-growing salons in North America.

“That’s a real novelty for a Hawaii-based corporation,” Brown says. “We’ve learned how to put a lot of business into a small space. Some clients are intimidated, that’s for sure. But a lot of clients love the action. It’s like a movie in here. Look, we’re doing five times the dollar gross that we did four years ago.”

Brown, 53, came to Honolulu from New York in 1969 on assignment as artistic director for an organization called Glemby, which, although now defunct, once managed 1,600 salons nationwide, operating out of hotels and department stores, including, in Hawaii, seven salons at Liberty House outlets. “I was 21 and one of 14 new art directors,” he says. “Most of the others wanted to be in New York or San Francisco or Europe. But I loved the water and I thought, what a wonderful opportunity.” When he arrived in Honolulu, Liberty House had 300 hairdressers. Marveling at his good fortune, Brown trained the staff, inspired motivation and innovation in the Glemby way and found a niche. But in the time-honored traditions of peripatetic hairstylists, working at Liberty House also opened Brown’s eyes to other possibilities. His stay with Glemby was short-lived.

In 1971, he got involved with a local family in a venture called Choppers, which didn’t work out (“The integrity just wasn’t there”). Then, early in 1972, with a small business loan, he took over a shop in the Yacht Harbor Tower that became very successful. “We called this place Choppers PB, but I was sued for using the old name,” Brown says. “My attorney at the time said, ‘use your own name,’ so we changed Choppers PB to Paul Brown, and that was that. I struck out on my own.”

Thus began, in the mid-1970s, what he, with some chagrin, now calls his “rah-rah-rah, bang-bang-bang” period. For the beauty industry, often dominated by youth and crass ego, it was another unhappy chapter to an old story. Overnight, the business was wildly successful, but the median age of the company was about 22, and there was nobody around with business savvy. “We were just shooting from the hip, but it was working,” Brown remembers. “Stylists hit the floor running. We had so much cash flow and we socked it into bigger places, mausoleum-type places, the way I see them now. We moved way too fast and, at least in part, we started to lose the quality. I had learned how to make it, but not how to hang onto it.

Then when things got tough, in the ’80s, I really didn’t know what to do. This was the dark era. We closed Pearl and sold San Francisco and sold Kailua. What did I learn? You’ve got to have the infrastructure, you’ve got to have the planning.”

Enter the era of the more sober Paul Brown operations: An older, wiser, better organized company with a bona-fide business and marketing plan. In 1989, Brown started the haircare line of products that bears his name (“I’m one of the only guys still alive who puts his name on a bottle”). This meant working with chemists and adapting Hawaiian plant essences into shampoos, conditioners, and things like Hawaiian Protein Flora Complex and Kukui Nut Oil (“the Hawaii mystique,” notes Brown). Not long afterwards, Brown moved his operations to Ward Center, a brilliant location change that paid off handsomely in brand image, identification and rejuvenated profitability.

Today, another significant source of income comes from the hairstyling academy, which Brown started in 1998, two- and three-day hands-on workshops for people with at least one year of salon experience, with fees ranging from $400 to $600. This is a natural business development, because Brown believes the success of his enterprises lies in the way he trains his staff.

“Anyone who comes in has to take our training, which is really the core of our business,” he says. “I really believe my staff is skilled, and that’s because of our training.”

Because hairstyling is a service business, which depends on quality professional relationships at all times, the ability of his staff to assume a genuinely respectful attitude toward clients, Brown insists, is the whole secret to his success. He admits that he has to frequently caution his staff about attitude and arrogance. He reminds them that they’re hairdressers, not Gods. “I think some people may feel we’re arrogant, but I don’t want them to feel that way,” he says. “People expect a certain expertise when they come to a Paul Brown Salon. They expect to be serviced, and they expect to leave satisfied. Who wants to go to a place where you feel uncomfortable?”

Now a shrewd businessman, Brown wants people to know he’s successful, but he doesn’t like to brag about dollars. “We are very happy right now,” he said. “The company has grown dramatically over the last five years.”

He’s more comfortable talking about his own clients, some of whom — politicians, performers, divas, doctors—he’s trimmed and moussed for 30 years. In May, he cut and styled the hair of a girl for her Punahou School prom. They talked and discovered that Brown had also styled her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother. “She couldn’t believe it,” Brown says. “She looked at me and said, ‘Just how old are you?’ I’m sure she thought I was 75 or 80. But then she said, ‘Hey, you look great for an old guy.’ And I looked at her, admiring my own work, of course, and said, ‘And you look fantastic for an 18-year-old.’”

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