Today we’d like to introduce you to India Bertin.
India Bertin is the visionary founder behind Hi Texture, a metro-ATL based salon chain catering to natural-haired women. Since childhood, India Bertin has been passionate about hair care and made the early decision to attend cosmetology school after high school. She initially channeled her love for hair by starting a natural hair blog in 2004 as a passion project.
On it, she shared information with other natural-haired women that included product reviews and styling tips. The blog gained popularity, but she needed to pivot away from her full-time corporate career in order to home school her son due to health issues.
In 2010, she made the difficult decision to shut down her blog to focus on her family. Yet, despite no longer being an active blogger, India continued to receive emails from her loyal readers with questions about natural hair care and salon referral requests. Those inquiries made her realize that there were few natural hair salons that catered to highly textured hair. So, in an effort to solve that problem, she opened her own. Hi Texture Salon was born in 2012 with the mission to empower natural haired women with the belief that textured hair is glamorous, chic and fashion-forward. In 2019, India opened a second location in Alpharetta, GA.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The road to Salon ownership has many unique obstacles and challenges. Getting customers is usually the biggest hurdle for many business owners. However, in the salon industry, keeping customers (or client-retention) is another important obstacle that is at the forefront of most salon owners’ agendas. As a result, delivering great customer service and educating our clients are one of our top priorities. Understanding that you have two sets of customers-your team and your clients is very important as well. In our salon, education, benefits and a creating a growth culture has been key to cultivating the great team that we have. Also, branding and standing out from competition in a heavy saturated market can also be a challenge. Social media, like Instagram and Facebook, has been key to helping us grow our brand.
Expanding to a second location has been the biggest challenge to-date because I now have double the responsibility. It wasn’t as easy as duplicating my first location. I essentially had to start from scratch building a team and establishing my brand in a new area. However, the challenge has been rewarding because it has been a reminder that there are no easy paths to success. Each path demands just as much time, passion and drive as the other in order to succeed.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Hi Texture Hair Salon, LLC story. Tell us more about the business.
At HI TEXTURE salon, we believe that highly textured hair, in its natural state, is not only beautiful, it is chic, glamorous and fashion-forward. Still, we understand how challenging, time-consuming and overwhelming it can be to care for and style highly textured hair.
Our experienced, licensed stylists use only the highest quality products and focus exclusively on styling natural hair. And, over the last seven years, we’ve perfected our signature Texture Styling method, giving women the confidence to rock their gorgeous texture boldly for every occasion.
HI TEXTURE salon has been recognized by Gwinnett Magazine and has been voted the Best Salon in Gwinnett County in 2016, 2017 and 2018. We were also named a Top 200 Salon by Salon Today Magazine in 2018. And the best part is, we’re just getting started!
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
In the era of Social Media, we witness the success off many entrepreneurs on a daily basis. Many times, chalking their success up to luck. However, we tend to forget that their success is a direct result of hard work and dedication. For me, there is no overnight success story, luck played a very minor role in my business. If any, luck with timing, because I started Hi Texture during a time where many salons did not cater to natural or textured hair. It’s been mostly non-stop hard work in putting together a talented team, trying to build a brand, expand, all while staying abreast of trends and customer needs.
Contact Info:
- Address: 1860 Atkinson Road, Suite 111
Lawrenceville, GA 300432880 Holcomb Bridge Road Suite 126
Alpharetta, GA 30022 - Website: www.hitexturehair.com
- Phone: (770) 237-0037
- Email: info@hitexturehair.com
- Instagram: @hitexturehair
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HiTextureHairSalon/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/hitexturehair
Image Credit:
India: MediaLifted Films, Models: Creative Soul Photography, Interior: Minerva Beauty
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