Alex Arts Hair Salon
Alex Arts Hair Salon is a Chinese-American owned business in Eastchester that offers a variety of services from men’s/women’s haircuts to hair coloring or perming. Since they first opened in 2019, Alex Arts has become an Asian American community cornerstone where friends meet to talk and get cuts or styling. Yet Alex and his team’s journey wasn’t always an easy one, and his salon only found business and community through challenge and perseverance.
Originally working in the White Plains area, Alex decided to open his salon in Eastchester to pursue a passion in hairdressing while learning more about the local community. Particularly, Alex pays attention to how individuality and respect plays a major role in styling or cutting hair. As he explained in their company culture, “our service goes beyond providing a satisfactory hairstyle; it is about creating a personalized image that showcases our clients’ confidence and charm.” With this attitude in mind, Alex set out to build his salon business and to pursue a service that respected and catered to all clients. However, the COVID-19 pandemic caused immediate hardship for the salon, on top of a slow start.
Alex recalls, “At that time, we had no reputation, only 3-5 customers a day, and occasionally no one at all. This was already very difficult. But what I didn't expect was that a few months later, the cov19 epidemic suddenly broke out, and the government ordered a shutdown of business for several months. At that time, we had no source of income, but we still had to pay rent, water, electricity, and all other expenses as usual, and we still needed to support our children. What’s even more pitiful is that our company had just been established, so we couldn’t get many government business subsidies.” Despite these challenges, Alex and his team’s efforts brought the salon out of its hardest years by continuing to provide simple and effective customer service. Alex later said that, “As long as you treat each customer well and provide value to them, I think there is no reason for them not to come back to you.”
When asked about challenges regarding the hairstyling industry as a whole, Alex responded with “...now is the era of the Internet, most information is transparent, and everyone has higher requirements for their own image, so the technical requirements for our hairstylists are also higher. Therefore, many hairstylists cannot bear the huge pressure brought by the industry, so they change their careers, resulting in a serious shortage of hairdressing talents in the current hairdressing industry. I also hope that every reader can understand the difficulties of our hairstylists, and at the same time, they need to respect every hairstylist.”
In the present, Alex Arts Hair Salon continues its culture of personalized hairdressing and friendly business. It’s not rare to see friends & family bumping into each other at the salon doors and it’s not rare to see Alex with a smile and enthusiasm as he greets each customer. From beginning with an artistic passion to facing hardships as a small business, Alex Arts Hair Salon has established itself as a bright and local AANHPI business.
*Alex’s responses were via in-person and message interviewing originally conducted in Mandarin. These sections have been translated to English using Google Translate.