Business is a marathon. Magda Smith’s been running for 50 years.
One of the sad sights of our modern age is watching small mom-and-pop businesses closing up shop, eclipsed by out-of-town supergiants and online marketplaces. Starting a new business in this fast-paced, highly-competitive environment takes skill and dedication, but keeping a business afloat for not just years but decades takes an entirely different set of skills.
Magda Smith is one local entrepreneur whose enterprise has endured decades. She’s maintained a small, close-knit team across fifty years and two states, and one December day she sat down with me in her Kingston Pike hair salon, Femme Touché, to talk about her experiences in the business of hair care.
Smith’s story begins soon after she immigrated from Munich, Germany. Her husband died young, leaving her to find a way of taking care of herself in an unfamiliar country.
“I learned to do hair in Illinois,” Smith recalls. “I went to school there with no English.”
Despite the challenges, Smith soon mastered the craft and opened her own salon, Magda’s Place, in Miami, Florida. While she doesn’t mention them often to newer customers, there are some big names that have paid a visit to her hairdresser’s chair. Among the photos in a collage on the salon wall, for instance, is a picture of her in her shop standing next to Julia Roberts.
Her time in Miami also brought together her core team, hairdressers Heather and Anton, both of whom traveled from Miami to Knoxville with her when she moved to East Tennessee. Anton sadly passed a few years ago, but Heather and Magda still work together every day, clipping away at their Kingston Pike location. That kind of decades-long loyalty, Smith says, from both employees and customers, is what keeps a business going for as long as hers has.
“We have a lot of customers we’ve known for a long time,” says Smith. “Believe it or not, I have one or two customers from Miami who still come here.”
While individual trends might come and go, hairstyling isn’t an industry that undergoes drastic changes like some others do, meaning that you can reliably hold onto customers for long periods of time. Often hairdressing customers can be generational; parents bring their kids, and then the kids, now adults, come back on their own and bring their own kids, keeping the wheel turning. It allows Smith to keep bringing in new customers, even though she’s never tried her hand at modern digital marketing.
“You have to use a computer for that, which I’m not very good at,” Smith admits.
With Anton’s passing, business has slowed somewhat, as Smith never replaced him, but after fifty years in the industry, Smith isn’t looking to expand her business – she’s left that phase far behind. She’s content to keep working in her shop just as it is so long as customers are coming through the door, and in that regard, the trust she’s built in her customer base is paying off.
A Detour for a Shave and a Haircut
Femme Touché has also recently become home to Jim Breeding, another long-time veteran of the local haircare scene. His Oak Ridge barbershop had to close in the aftermath of the pandemic, but even after 60 years, Breeding wasn’t willing to hang up his scissors just yet.
“Jim approached us because he had his own business, and he wanted to work closer to Knoxville,” says Smith.
Now in his 80s, Breeding only works part-time, but he’s still proud to call himself one of the last original barbers of Oak Ridge. The barbershop chair he brought with him to Femme Touché from his old shop is also one of the originals, with 65 years of service behind it.