It’s a Wednesday afternoon and Sydney Jayne, 42, is in an empty room with walls as white as a blank painter’s canvas. Milky rays spin in through the skylight she installed with her boyfriend Tachu Soto, for the new incarnation of her Jayne & Co. salon she’s planning to open next to the Quik Stop gas station in a few weeks.
Here, at the beginning stages of iterating her business—in a space she and her boyfriend own—she can’t help but reflect on her earlier entrepreneurial efforts.
“I saw that this building was for sale last year and didn’t think much of it,” says Jayne, who was, at that point, going strong at the storefront she rents at the Highway 9 and Graham Hill Road intersection. “I contacted the realtor and asked the realtor if I could speak to the owner. And it was a match made in heaven really.”
She’s got a lofty vision, but has carefully plotted out the steps of just how she’ll arrive there.
Jayne & Co. started as a single-chair salon, but quickly grew to a six-chair operation.
The new location will feature eight chairs on one side of the building. The other self-contained area will be reserved for an ice cream shop, which she says to expect in about a year—perhaps sooner if they can get funding together more quickly.
Her salon business will still be known as Jayne & Co. They’ve already registered their frozen treats business, calling it Felton Creamery.
“It was one of those things that was scary,” Jayne says about pulling the trigger on the big purchase. “But, I’ve learned that fear is just a feeling. It doesn’t really hold me back from doing anything anymore. It’s been great just going through the motions and everything falling into place perfectly. It’s just asking for what you want and, I don’t know, I just feel I have some really good karma right now. And this building is perfect.”
She sees açaí bowls and boba beverages in her future. As she sits on the overturned gray bucket covered by a beach towel, she pictures the Spanish modern style interior design that’s about to appear.
And while the creamery opening is still a ways off in the distance, the salon move is coming up pretty soon.
“I believe we will be moving everything over the week of Thanksgiving, and hope to be open that following Monday,” she says. “I’m just really excited about my future and growing more. My goal is really to get out from behind the chair and run the business, because now I’m doing everything.”
It’s been quite the long road to get here. Her first haircare business was one she opened in Live Oak, called Practical Magic, with her mom. She was just 19 then.
“I was a beach bum and didn’t want to work as hard as my mom wanted me to,” she recalls. “It was: get up in the morning, go to the beach and hang out at the beach all day.”
The party life of her late teens and early 20s is a world away from where she’s ended up—sober and industrious in the San Lorenzo Valley. The mother-daughter duo ended up selling the business after a couple years.
“Fast forward to 2012,” says Jayne, jumping to her second business—Taylor & Jayne—which she launched up the peninsula toward San Francisco in Belmont with Michele Mirassou. “It was a two-chair salon.”
They were blessed with a loyal clientele, drawn primarily from surrounding communities, such as Woodside and Burlingame.
“It was very different,” she says, comparing her first two companies. “It was great.”
She’d been out of the workforce for two years, and now had three boys to care for. After three years cutting hair in Belmont, they figured they’d try a new location.
“We both lived in the Los Gatos-San Jose area and decided we were going to move and open a salon in Los Gatos,” she remembers. “We were very nervous about it.”
She wasn’t sure their customers would be willing to make the trip all the way down to the South Bay. They needn’t have fretted.
“All of our clients followed us,” she says. “It was amazing.”
From Salon Owner to Volunteer Firefighter
Business was steady and Jayne was able to focus on parenting.
“Michele and I had a great partnership,” she says of the three-chair business at Blossom Hill and Harwood roads. “The biggest thing was we were closer to home, and closer to our families. My kids were still young at the time. And Michele had two kids. We were able to be more involved in our kids’ lives.”
Jayne was able to purchase a house in Twain Harte, part of the sprawling “Gold Country” in Tuolumne County.
“I was driving back and forth, still working at the Los Gatos salon,” she says, explaining she’d sometimes stay with her mom, and other times with Mirassou. “Then, all salons got shut down.”
The Covid-19 pandemic had clouded her economic outlook.
“It was scary. We got shut down the first time; and they let us back in. Then, it got shut down again,” she recalls. “I struggled with, you know, ‘Is the salon going to open back up?’ And I decided that I was going to go to fire academy.”
She applied to Columbia College Fire Academy and let go of her half of the Taylor & Jayne partnership.
“It was a hard decision, but I was happy that I did it,” she says. “I loved going to school. I loved fire academy.”
She got a volunteer firefighting position with the Mi-Wuk Sugar Pine Fire Protection District.
“It was incredible,” she says. “I felt like I could have sat around forever and waited for salons to open back up, or I could join the people that were helping in the pandemic. And I feel like (doing) hair is helping people. I was still helping in any way that I could.”
At the end of 2021, she and her husband separated, prompting some serious soul-searching.
“It was probably the lowest and hardest point in my life,” she says. “I didn’t really know where I wanted to go. And I ended up back in Santa Cruz. I was staying at AirBnBs at the time.”
To top it off, she realized, at her age, it would still be a long time of climbing the ladder in the fire world to make good money. Luckily, she had a friend who had a chair for her at her hair salon in Capitola.
And her Pleasure Point party days finally paid off in a big way, when she reconnected with a guy she knew from when she was “running around” Pleasure Point—her current partner Soto.
“I definitely fantasized about still doing fire,” she says. “But it was one of those things where I needed to get back on my feet and do what needed to be done.”
Turning Dreams into Reality
Jayne began volunteering at Henry Cowell Redwood State Park. And one day, while passing through Felton, a “For Rent” sign jumped out at her. It was hanging off a black and white building, which, she says, is “very much my style.”
She couldn’t wait to tell her boyfriend about it. “You should check it out,” he told her. “I think it would be awesome.” At the time, she didn’t even have her own home. It was hard to wrap her head around the idea of opening another business.
“It felt like a pipe dream,” she says.
She decided to meet with the owners anyway. The gears in her head began to turn, as she compared the rental cost with her past haircare ledgers.
“I was like, ‘Dang! I could make that much money a month by myself,’” she says.
It helped that she had a new handyman boyfriend to help transform the address for her salon.
“I just kept doing the next step,” Jayne says. “For 30 days I slept in this space, because I didn’t really have a place to live. And we remodeled it.”
Now, as she executes her new business move, she gets a little emotional thinking about that period in her life.
“I was still going through a really hard time with my divorce. Life was not easy. I feel like I was just tenacious and I just made it happen. And my boyfriend always said, ‘I believe in you. And I will help you,’” she recalls. “I had a feeling that it would be a successful business.”
And boy, was it ever.
“From the day that I opened, I was blown away with all of the clients coming in, all of the clients saying, ‘Oh my gosh, we needed a salon like this here.’ That turned into stylists starting to come in, wanting to work there. I’d make a little money; I’d buy another chair—another station—and hire another stylist. And then that stylist would get booked,” she says. “That went on and on. And I went from one chair to six chairs and six stylists. And all of them quickly getting booked.”
Jayne says it took her just three months to build what likely would’ve taken three years anywhere else. She credits the supportiveness of the community, and the team of like-minded stylists she attracted.
“It’s just created an amazing environment,” she says. “It’s all about the customer, the client. Making them feel beautiful. It’s the best. I’m very lucky.”
Jayne believes she’s also benefiting from recent demographic changes.
“A lot of people have moved here from Silicon Valley,” she says, reflecting on the work-from-home shift that’s allowed more people to live in the San Lorenzo Valley. “They want to live in a beautiful place.”
They’d arrive and discover that the community didn’t have the same high-end amenities as Los Gatos or much of the rest of the Bay Area.
“When I opened they were like, ‘Oh shoot! I’ll give her a try,’” she says. “A lot of people in the mountains don’t want to leave the mountain.”
It was like a perfect positive storm that translated to a hoppin’ salon scene.
“I think it was the luxury of convenience, combined with my 25 years of experience doing hair and my desire to take good care of clients. That was the winning ticket,” Jayne says. “I needed them and they needed me.”
Plus, she still has clients who will make the trek from the Belmont area—and even San Francisco.
“Just with the success of the business, and how it’s growing, and the amount of clients, and the amount of stylists that have inquired about working with us, I thought it would be great to expand,” she says. “I thought it would be awesome to own and build equity, not only in the business, but in the building.”
