Behind the Look: Janine Jarman Wants You to Feel at Home in Her Salon

The founder of the iconic Hairroin brand shares her vision of a welcoming salon environment and how the right salon software helps her achieve it

“I was never great at anything,” says Janine Jarman, though her credentials beg to differ. A 20-year veteran of the beauty industry, Janine is the owner of the Los Angeles-based Hairroin salon, creator of the Curl Cult line of haircare products, a celebrity stylist whose former clients include the Pussycat Dolls, and a finalist on Bravo’s Shear Genius. As it turned out, she was pretty darn good at styling hair, not to mention her natural knack for running a successful business. 

Janine, a Boulevard customer, sat down with us to chat about how she got started in the hair industry and why she made it her mission to make people feel comfortable in her salon. 

From high school dance updos to Hollywood glamour shots

Janine transformed her first client’s hair in the dressing room of a bikini shop where she worked in high school. A classmate asked if she could do her hair for a dance after noticing Janine sporting a trendy updo. She was a natural: “It really felt like an extension of my own hand, doing the hair,” Janine said. But even more so, Janine found herself enjoying the process of building up a clientele. Word got around that Janine was good at hair and soon she was running a small business with her best friend, styling fellow high schoolers for special events.  

After training in beauty school, Janine made her way from her hometown of Huntington Beach, CA to Hollywood. She opened her first business, Hairroin Salon, in 2005, which soon became a go-to for Florence Welch, Tommy Lee, Kylie Minogue, Danica Patrick, and Fergie, to name a few. Since then, Janine has gone on to do hair for film and television and was a longtime stylist for the Pussycat Dolls; she even created Nicole Scherzinger’s famous faux hawk along the way. 

Putting clients’ comfort first

When she first started her salon, Janine says her primary focus was making her clients feel at home. When working at other salons, she noticed that clients would often tell her they were intimidated by those high-style, hectic environments and felt scared to come in. And that, Janine thought, defeated the whole point. A salon should be “a place of renewal, self-expression, it should be about you,” she explained, not about portraying highbrow ideals of beauty culture. 

To that end, she set about creating a place where people felt welcome, rearranging the stations and adding homey, laid-back furniture to put people at ease. She also hired a team of creative, eclectic individuals who could work as a community and click with individual clients, so everyone who walked through the doors felt heard. Aside from wanting to create an inclusive space, Janine told us that making her salon inviting was a good differentiator from the competition.

In yet another effort to empower her clients, she started Curl Cult, a permanent texture service that provides live-in, easy-to-style waves and curls that people can care for at home in between salon visits. “The number one thing my clients ask for is ‘How can I make it look like this at home?’” Janine said. Curl Cult, which took five years to formulate in conjunction with a lab in Italy, was the answer. 

The ability to create custom experiences that take into consideration the client’s hair health and styling needs was and is a priority for Janine. But to achieve these goals, Janine knew she had to invest in marketing tools that allowed her to speak to each client on an individual level. And so, Janine came to be a Boulevard customer. 

Understanding how technology enhances the client experience

In 18 years of running a salon business, Janine went through a number of salon software providers with varying degrees of failure — “It’s always been a disaster” both for her clients and her team. She was on pins and needles about making the switch to Boulevard, up until the first set-up call. “ It was so easy, I was able to do it on my phone and went ‘Oh, that was really undramatic’,” Janine said. Switching to Boulevard also helped her team communicate with clients more seamlessly, but above all else, Janine says she loves that Boulevard puts their customers first, “They speak hairdresser and salon owner,” Janine said. While booking clients online felt impossible in the past, it’s now become the primary way Hairroin schedules appointments. Her team is also looking forward to using Boulevard’s marketing suite to send customized messages and recapture clients as part of their goal to provide unique client experiences.

Her words of wisdom to aspiring salon owners? “Never forget that we’re here for the clients,” Janine says, “it can be hard, being a ‘hairapist,’ but if you do great work and make meaningful connections, you will build a book of business where you’ll be excited to stand behind the chair every day.”