About Jessica
Shampoo assistant. Stylist. Master colorist. Salon owner, twice over. Platform artist. Educator. And for the better part of a decade, the person responsible for education at a global color brand.
That is thirty-three years of watching this industry from every seat it has — which is why the advice sounds different coming from her.
The short version
She started at the bottom of a chain salon and worked up through supervision. She went out on the floor and built a clientele. She opened her own salon in New York and ran it for fifteen years — through recessions, staff turnover, comp-structure rewrites, and every version of the same argument every owner has about how to pay people.
Somewhere in the middle of that, L'Oréal Professionnel made her Senior Director of Education & Development. She spent a decade building the systems that teach thousands of stylists — curriculum, standards, the difference between a class that entertains a room and a class that changes what someone does on Monday.
Then she did the thing almost no coach in this industry has done. She sold the salon — to one of her own stylists — and moved south, where she opened a booth-rental salon in Florida that she still runs today. A second business, a second model, a second education.
Today she's Executive Director at Aloxxi International, and she mentors a handful of stylists and owners one-on-one. A handful, deliberately.
The part that matters
Right now the industry is split down the middle — rent the chair or hire the team, contractor or employee, freedom or structure. Most people advising on that question have only ever lived one side of it.
For part of the New York run, that salon operated commission and rental under one roof at the same time — two comp structures, one team, one set of standards. If you want to know what actually happens when you try that, she has the scar tissue.
Owners don't fail from a lack of talent. They fail from not understanding the math — and from not having clean guidelines and expectations.
The long version
On the road
Jessica is a blonding specialist — balayage, foilayage, babylights, the maintenance nobody teaches — and her signature class is All Things Blonde. But she teaches the business just as often as the technique, because she has watched too many brilliant colorists go broke.
Stages, salons, trade floors and the HSN set — thirty-three years of rooms.
Why she does this
Thirty-three years in, the pattern is hard to miss. The stylists who struggle are almost never the ones who can't do hair. They're the ones who were taught colour theory and cutting and were never taught a profit and loss statement, a pay structure, a lease, or how to hold a team to a standard without becoming someone they don't like.
That gap is what Salon Economics exists to close. Not with a course you'll never finish or a group where everyone talks and nobody changes — one-on-one, on your actual numbers, with someone who has done it twice and sold one of them. As she puts it, her career now is spent helping other people perfect theirs.
