The owner and operator of Vanity the Salon, a Healdsburg beauty parlor, has moved to a new location, after nearly two years of struggling to keep her business — in an industry particularly hard hit by the pandemic — alive.
The process, ending in her downsizing and moving shop, exacted a heavy emotional toll on Jennifer Cadd — not to mention a financial one, as she spent her savings funneling money into rent and ultimately hiring an attorney to help escape her lease. But while Vanity isn’t out of the woods yet, her doors are open, and her six employees continue to have jobs.
Cadd opened Vanity at its previous location in the Vineyard Plaza shopping center near Starbucks in 2019, taking over for the owners of Cloud 9, a salon that operated in the same location. Her successful pre-pandemic business offered tanning, aesthetician services, hair and nail stations and retail — while employing over 13 people aside from herself. But, as we know all too well now, COVID-19 would soon arrive on scene and change everything.
“2019 came and went, and we were making money, kicking a– and taking names,” Cadd said. “In March of 2020, they shut us down for COVID. They said two and a half weeks to slow the spread, but it was two and a half months.”
Sonoma County shifted in and out of various degrees of lockdowns that first year when Cadd was allowed to reopen, she took measures to keep customers safe. She put shower curtains up between stations and made personal protective equipment readily available. Measures like this got people in the door, but added sanitation time before and after stylings reduced chair availability and cut into profits. When severe lockdowns returned in December 2020, Cadd was able to keep the doors open for retail and tanning only.
Even though Cadd said tanning was perfectly safe because clients are alone in the room and ultra-violet (UV) light kills microbes, they enhanced already heavy sanitation procedures. But tanning never came back the way it had prior to the pandemic. Reduction in tanning customers, a service that requires a full-time receptionist to be available for walk-ins, wasn’t working anymore. The decline in demand for hair styling services, along with incentives not to work such as enhanced unemployment benefits, meant Cadd was losing stylists and revenue from their now-empty chairs.
In January 2021, when lockdowns began to lift and Cadd’s funds — including personal savings — were drying up, she began worrying about how they would get through another lockdown. She said efforts to negotiate decreased rent with her landlord were unsuccessful.
Like many business owners, Cadd got public assistance such as Payroll Protection Plan loans, but it was never quite enough to help her pay her $6,200 monthly rent, and loans would have to be paid back. Her landlord offered to take $1,700 off her rent, which would go into an account she would have to pay back as well, but Cadd instead made the difficult decision to hire an attorney, at the cost of thousands of dollars, to negotiate her out of her lease. She was ultimately able to do so, officially moving out of her former space in December 2021.
“The negotiations were very difficult, very soul sucking. I feel like I lost part of myself. I have done everything I can to stay afloat this year, and I am just so done. I’m so tired. I’m so sad that I worked this hard and put so much into a business that I had to walk away from,” Cadd said, her voice breaking.
She said, “I went up against a dragon and fought a mighty battle, but I didn’t win. Getting out of a triple-net lease is ridiculously hard. But we gathered everything and we’re starting anew with a more manageable location.”
That new location is at 810 Healdsburg Ave., and while it lacks some of the tourist walk-ins Cadd could expect at Vineyard Plaza, it has good drive-by visibility and her clientele are mostly loyal locals who have followed her and her stylists. Cadd emphasizes that hers is a family-run operation, both employing and serving locals.
Vanity’s finances have improved, the new location is more sustainable, and Cadd has a positive relationship with her new landlord and rents at half what she was paying previously.
Her new landlord, John Dayton, has, she said, “held her hand through the whole process,” and Cadd said her current commercial lease is much more manageable than her prior triple-net lease.
But there’s been some significant downsizing. By the time Cadd was ready to move, she was down to six stylists (her “girls”) and herself, who now work out of three rooms with two chairs each, a shampoo station in the back and a retail section in front. Cadd’s daughter Katie Ward, who was touching up walls with a paintbrush when SoCoNews interviewed Cadd in mid-January, said “It’s a beautiful location.”
Ward and her sister Mary Cadd helped staff the desk at Vanity’s last location for tanning clients when Cadd could no longer afford to keep a full-time receptionist. Ward has a small display in front where she sells products like jewelry and apparel, and she said after some remodeling is complete, she will expand her selection, along with retail products behind the counter.
“It’s somewhat of a family affair,” Ward said.
Cadd said she is still struggling financially after weathering COVID-19 for two years, and even though it looks like COVID measures will loosen further soon, maybe permanently, she said she lost about 40% of her clientele. Sitting in her salon chair, she holds her thumb and index finger a half-inch apart to indicate how small her margins currently are.
According to Cadd, many of her male customers’ wives began cutting their hair for them during lockdowns, and she doubts they’ll return in the same numbers.
Plus, she doesn’t have the space for tanning — which has struggled to bring in revenue for her throughout the pandemic anyway. She looks pained when she talks about being unable to sell off her three $5,000 tanning beds, which she ultimately scrapped.
Cadd is currently writing to Congressman Jared Huffman and state representatives, having heard they may be able to help others get Small Business Administration (SBA) loans, and other forms of public assistance for businesses struggling to survive the impacts of COVID-19.
Although the whole process of escaping her last lease and moving shop has left its marks, she’s glad she didn’t quit and rent a chair somewhere herself, as her six staff who didn’t leave during COVID, whom she considers family, still have jobs.
“One of the things I was concerned about was that my staff rely on me. If I had just closed my doors and found a chair for myself at another salon, people would have lost their jobs and then I would have taken a chair somewhere else one of my employees could have taken,” Cadd said.
For Cadd, the nightmare isn’t yet over, and the experience of fighting so hard to keep her business has left her “broken.” But Ward said that through the experience, they learned the importance of not giving up, even when the chips are down.
“I think what we learned is that in a situation like this, you should stick up for yourself, and fight for yourself. Because there might not be anyone else who does,” Ward said.
