Company name: JD’s Barbershop
Principals: Judah Down and Riva Pollard
Locations: 235 Abbott Street and 915 West Hastings Street (Vancouver Club)
Business venture: A “new-school” barbershop offering clipper cuts and hot shaves for a young, hip demographic.
Business lesson: Look outside your city for trends that you can transplant locally and cash in on.
History: When condo development pushed stylist and entrepreneur Judah Down and his first hair salon out of Yaletown, Down and his business partner, Riva Pollard, decided to set up shop in then-dingy Gastown. The lure? Cheap rent and hope of future gentrification.
Location wasn’t the only thing Down and Pollard opted to change as they launched their second hair-focused business in 2002. Taking their cue from a trend that was taking off in the United States, they decided to open JD’s Barbershop: the first “new school” barbershop in Vancouver’s downtown core.
“There’s always been those old school barbershops but this was for guys 30 and under who wanted a good hair cut and didn’t want to pay salon prices,” said Down, who is now a master barber while Pollard handles the company’s social networking.
“This was a back-to-the-roots barbershop with hot shaves and clipper cuts and good music.”
In launching the shop, Down said he researched what men wanted to pay for a haircut, and chose a price point midway between a no-frills barbershop and a high-end salon; currently, the Gastown shop offers haircuts, which Down describes as “the quality of a $50 haircut,” for $35.
In order to offer hot shaves, Down tracked down a third-generation barber in North Vancouver, got some lessons in the technique and then practised on his friends.
Beyond the specialty barbershop offerings, Down and Pollard planned to keep offering the same hair-cutting and colouring services they’d offered at their former Yaletown salon: House of Envy.
Opening up in Gastown, Down said he and Pollard anticipated that the shop would attract an urban hip-hop crowd looking for clipper cuts and fades; instead, JD found its niche with artsy, style-conscious hipsters.
Down noted that the business struggled and lost money for the first couple years before Gastown’s fortunes started to pick up.
JD’s own fortunes got a key boost in 2007 when the Vancouver Club invited Down to open a second barbershop location in the lower level of the historic club. Down describes his second location as “classy” and “scotch on the table.”
But Down dates the bulk of his success back to 2010 when the Olympics and the opening of the new Woodwards building breathed new life into Gastown, and fuelled growth at his Gastown location. Starting that year, he said, the business burst through the break-even mark to become profitable, with revenues growing by 30% annually since.
“People were not parking their cars on the streets there, they were not walking their dogs,” he said. “We’d get there in the morning and there’d be junkies in the front; it was messy.”
The move, he said, also proved too great a shift for some of his former Yaletown clientele.
“We lost a lot of clientele because we moved to a neighbourhood that was definitely not up-and-coming yet.”
By sticking it out, however, JD’s has been able to benefit from a cheap long-term lease and what’s become a prime location. And now, with Gastown’s future looking rosy, Down says JD’s is poised to ride the neighbourhood’s growing success.
“Now that the buildings are starting to fill up down there, we’re the barbershop – it’s inevitable that we’re going to continue to grow, I hope.”
A second key challenge, Down said, has been finding the right staff and getting them trained to the right level of skill. He said that hot shaves aren’t taught locally and barbershops’ trademark clipper cuts are only rarely taught – making for a longer training process for new staff.
Down noted that opening at the Vancouver Club location just five years after opening in Gastown added new challenges to the mix. He was spread thin managerially, working solo at the club to build up business while simultaneously overseeing the business of his Gastown shop.
Building up his club clientele, he said, was a challenge of its own. Club clientele, he said, proved resistant to change – particularly when it came to switching from a longtime barber for “the guy downstairs whom they hardly know.”
“The first six months I pretty much just sat here in the chair and waited, met people one by one and read the paper.”
The club barbershop, he said, has grown slowly and is now operating at 50% capacity, while the Gastown store is busier.
Going forward, Down said that besides continuing to build up business at both shops, he’s working on a retail line of hair and shaving products.
He said he’s already located a lab that will customize and produce the products he wants and is currently working with branding professionals to develop the look of the merchandise.
“That bottle has got to look amazing,” he said. “People need to want to have that.”
Down said he hopes to have retail products on his shelves by year end.
“Most salons by necessity are, in their décor and how they approach things, either a little bit more feminine or gender-neutral leaning toward femininity,” he said, commenting that approximately three-quarters of Vancouver hair salon clients, at Suki’s and elsewhere, are women.
“[Men] come into a salon and they’re surrounded primarily by women,” he said. “So some people are comfortable and some people aren’t.”
Creating a hair-services business styled as “a guys’ hangout,” he said, can capitalize on a current market gap in hair services.
“I don’t know how good their work is but I certainly like the way they’ve positioned themselves.”
Moreland also saw merit in JD’s plan to expand into a product offering, noting that many salons follow this path.
“Your margins are in product and if you do your own product, your margins are going to go higher.”
Perhaps even more important than those margins, he said, is the way product recommendations can bolster client loyalty.
“Their hair looks better longer because a lot of shampoos that you buy in a drugstore or supermarket are not really engineered for human hair.”