Beach Break Salon has been serving the Gainesville community for 10 years while putting customers at the forefront of its foundation. The business prides itself on providing an amiable and laid-back atmosphere for people from all walks of life.
Natasha Samuel, the owner of Beach Break Salon, was born and raised in Jacksonville. She moved to Gainesville to be closer to her boyfriend, who played for the Florida Gators football team at the time. She had always been passionate about hairstyling and decided to pursue a career in cosmetology. She attended Summit Salon Academy, a local cosmetology school, where she earned her cosmetology degree.
After Samuel finished cosmetology school, she started working for Brenda DuVal, the founder of Beach Break Salon, to gain valuable experience. DuVal started putting more responsibility on Samuel and trained her to eventually take over the business.
“For the past three years, I pretty much ran the salon locally while [DuVal] was away. I would do payroll, renew our licenses, taxes, the bills, and deal with clients and customer complaints,” Samuel said.
Samuel always had aspirations of owning her own salon, and at the start of this year, she bought Beach Break from DuVal. She now handles the everyday operations of the business. Her goal is to see the brand grow and do amazing things in the community.
“We want people to come in and feel this relaxed atmosphere. We want you to enjoy yourself and talk with everyone in the salon,” Samuel said.
Kate Coiner, the salon manager at Beach Break, moved to Florida two years ago. She has loved working at Beach Break ever since and was recently promoted to salon manager in June. Samuel and Coiner have formed a great friendship and use their combined expertise to their advantage. The pair has recently been working towards implementing cosmetic changes to the salon.
“We’ve really focused this last year on investing in updates and giving the salon a facelift. We’ve put in new chairs, new decor, and new waiting furniture,” Samuel said.
The COVID-19 pandemic certainly brought unexpected challenges for the salon, but they were able to bounce back fast due to wishful thinking and a smart strategy. The salon closed in March, which left a lot of clients in limbo since they had already pre-booked their appointments. Samuel came up with a solution to pre-book appointments several months in advance and offer the clients a discount if they wanted to prepay for their appointments.
The plan worked as projected and many of the clients paid for their appointments in advance. Now that Beach Break is receiving the same volume of people that they had before closing, Samuel is focused on promoting and expanding the business.
“We want to open locations but franchise them out to the girls that work for us. We want to allow them to be able to open their own salon with our help,” Samuel said.
Listen to the 124th episode of WHOA GNV podcast to hear more about Natasha Samuel’s journey as a new business owner and her goals for expanding the salon.
