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You know the moment... You're driving home, the radio's on but you couldn't tell anyone what's playing. Or you're sitting on the edge of your bed in a towel, hair still wet, just staring at the closet. Not deciding what to wear. Not really doing... anything.
Your brain just... stopped. Not resting, exactly. More like it finally got a second to catch up on all the things it didn't have time to process during the day, and in the meantime, there's nothing there. No plan. No idea. No thought worth finishing. Just static.
That's not failure. That's just what happens sometimes after a full day behind the chair. The system needs a second to reboot, and reboot means blank, not productive.
And then, every once in a while, out of absolutely nowhere, something shows up in that blank space. No buildup, no reason, it's just suddenly there. You didn't go looking for it. You couldn't have.
None of it happens on command. It just happens, eventually, when it's ready to. That's true of the boundary you finally write down, the brand you spend decades building, the skill you don't notice sharpening until it's already sharp. It's true of this newsletter issue too, honestly, it came together the same unpredictable way.
Our featured article tackles the boundary a lot of us put off writing down for way too long: a cancellation policy isn't punishment, it's protection, and getting that distinction right changes everything about how you enforce it.
This issue's Monster Advice comes from Sonya Dove, forty-five years into building one brand, one decision at a time. If you've ever wondered what it actually takes to stick with something long enough for it to become something, this one's worth sitting with.
On the podcast, Liam sits down with Joseph DiMaggio for a conversation that goes well past technique, from cutting hair on tour to backstage at Fashion Week to building education systems from scratch, none of it built on shortcuts. Just repetition, failure, and mentorship, done long enough to matter.
And this issue's playlist, Everybody's Floor, is a groove that starts with one boogaloo record and doesn't stop moving, pulling sounds from Brazil, Lagos, Tokyo, Havana, and everywhere in between. Press play and let it carry you through the rest of this issue.
-The salonMonster team |
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Getting Paid, Made Simple
Let's talk money. Not the awkward kind of conversation you have at the chair, the easy kind: our built-in payment processor.
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you start out: your booking system and your payment system should never be two separate headaches. With salonMonster's built-in processor, they're not. Every payment, deposit, and tip flows straight into your books the second it happens. No manual entry of all your daily invoices, no reconciling spreadsheets at midnight, no wondering if last Tuesday's numbers actually add up.
Here's the part that actually matters for your bottom line: payments sync straight to your books automatically. That means less time reconciling numbers at the end of the night and more time doing what you're actually good at. Deposits, tips, and rebooking fees all flow through the same system, so nothing slips through the cracks.
And because it's built into salonMonster from the ground up, it just works the way you'd expect it to. No workarounds, no third-party plugins holding your business together with tape. One system, one login, one less thing to think about. |
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Tools
The world’s smallest instant analog camera brings BIG energy. Take it anywhere and everywhere, and capture life unfiltered, in photos that fit right in your pocket.
With a selfie mirror, self-timer, and double exposure mode, Go Gen 3 adds a fresh lens and stronger flash for clearer shots in any light, and more zoomed-in selfies with less glare.
Five bold new colors. Compatible with Polaroid Go film. Let’s gooooo. |
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Distractions
If you've never picked up an issue, Artforum is the art world's most influential publication, the place critics, curators, and artists themselves have turned to for decades to actually think through what's happening in contemporary art. It's dense, it's smart, and it doesn't dumb anything down for you.
Here's why it's worth a flip-through even if you're not "an art person": the eye you're training every day behind the chair, color, proportion, movement, how something reads from across a room, is the same eye Artforum's critics are using to talk about a painting or an installation. Spend twenty minutes with an issue and you might walk away seeing your next color placement or cut a little differently. |
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Behind the software is a team that genuinely cares about independent hairdressers. The Independent Chair is where we get to say so in long form. |
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A cancellation policy is a boundary, not a punishment
Part 1 of 3 in our cancellation policy series. Your five-hour colour appointment does not cancel itself. It arrives as a text at 10:47 p.m.: “So sorry! Something came up. Can we do next week?” Now you are deciding whether to charge a fee, waive it, explain the rule you thought the client knew, and … |
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The Long Game According to
Sonya Dove
Forty-five years in, Sonya Dove is still learning, still telling the truth, and still saying yes to things that scare her.
Sonya Dove has spent 45 years in hair, 42 of them with Wella. She is an artistic director for Intercoiffure, part of the Ulta Beauty Pro Team, and has worked on everything from international stages to major film transformations.
Her career looks extraordinary from the outside. Her advice, though, is refreshingly practical: stay patient, protect your integrity, and keep making room to be a beginner.
Give good work enough time Sonya entered competitions for years before earning her first top-three finish. "It didn't just happen overnight," she told salonMonster's Liam Shea.
That matters in an industry where every scroll can make it seem as though someone else became fully booked, won the award, or built the perfect brand between Tuesday and Friday. The useful lesson is not that every goal must take seven years. It is that slow progress is still progress. Repetition is how your hands get surer, your eye gets sharper, and your point of view becomes your own. A quiet season is not proof that you have missed your chance.
Choose relationships you can keep working on After more than four decades with one brand, Sonya is not interested in pretending that a different partnership would come without challenges. "The grass isn't greener," she said. For her, a strong working relationship is more like a tango: "It takes two."
That is useful advice whether you are choosing a product partner, an educator, a salon, or a team. Longevity does not mean never questioning the relationship. It means both sides continue to show up, support each other, and make the work better.
Tell the truth, even when the fantasy is prettier When Sonya was asked to take actor Sophie Turner from red to platinum in one session, she said the honest timeline was closer to a year and four months if Turner wanted to keep her waist-length hair. The transformation happened gradually.
That kind of honesty is part of the craft. Social media can flatten months of chemistry, care, and maintenance into one impossible before-and-after. Your client does not need you to compete with the fantasy. She needs your trained eye, a realistic plan, and the confidence to say what her hair can actually handle.
Keep a life where you can still surprise yourself At the time of the interview, Sonya was 63 and had just agreed to perform cumbia, bachata, and salsa with dancers decades younger than her. She initially said no. Then she wrote down what frightened her and realized, "They're all things that my brain was telling me, not my heart." So she called back and said yes.
After a lifetime of being excellent at hair, Sonya chose to be new at something again. That may be the best career advice in the whole conversation. Build the skill. Tell the truth. Honour the people who grow with you. And do not let your work become the only place where you feel alive.
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Thanks for being here
Whether you've been with us for years or just found us at 2am in a scheduling spiral — welcome.
Running a salon is no joke. We're just here to make it slightly less chaotic. — Liam, Stephen, Annie, Denber, Layla & Niku |
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Glow Brazil Beauty, Jeddah
I’m loving the baby-blue palette in this salon concept by Farnaz Dardaee. Beautiful tiles add texture, while soft curves bring a playful flow to the space, especially the glowing frames surrounding the mirrors. It’s dreamy, polished, and just a little Grecian futuristic.
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Ctrl + Stephen Random thoughts on business and tech |
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When Working Hard Stops Working
Confession: I’m a workaholic.
I love creating things. I get a genuine buzz from taking an idea and turning it into something real, and I’m naturally drawn to the stimulation of work. There’s always another problem to solve, another idea to chase, or another supposedly urgent task waiting for me.
I also know this isn’t always healthy, or even productive.
Case in point: I’m writing this at 11 a.m. on a Sunday, when I should probably be kicking back and recharging for the week ahead.
I find it difficult to stop. Partly because I enjoy the work, and partly because being busy can feel reassuringly productive. But there’s an important difference between doing a lot of work and doing the work that actually matters. When I don’t give myself enough time to recover, I can roll into Monday already exhausted. I’m technically working, but sometimes I’m really just going through the motions.
That’s when the quality of my thinking suffers. I have enough energy to respond to whatever feels urgent, but not enough perspective to ask whether it’s important. I can keep the machine running while losing the capacity to decide whether it’s running in the right direction.
Stephen Covey describes this in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as maintaining the balance between production and our capacity to produce. His seventh habit, “Sharpen the Saw,” is about renewing the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual parts of ourselves that make good work possible in the first place.
In other words, if we never stop to maintain the machine, eventually the machine stops working.
I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. In my early twenties, anxiety and crippling panic attacks brought my life to a halt. It took a long time to rebuild my capacity, and although things are much better now, I know that relentlessly pushing myself has consequences.
The frustrating part is that I still haven’t mastered this. I can recognize the pattern and continue repeating it—sometimes while writing a newsletter article about why I shouldn’t.
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with analog ways to interrupt it. I’m buying magazines again. I’ll make a coffee, take a book into the backyard, and sit somewhere away from the screens and unfinished tasks that keep calling me back. It doesn’t need to be profound. The point is simply to give my mind somewhere else to go—and sometimes nowhere to go at all.
I’m slowly learning that downtime isn’t the opposite of meaningful work. It’s part of what makes meaningful work possible. Rest gives us enough space to notice the idea that has been quietly forming, question the habit that no longer serves us, or make the clear decision that an exhausted brain would have missed.
This is very much a work in progress for me. If you’ve found ways to step away, recharge, and protect your capacity without feeling guilty about it, I’d genuinely love to hear them.
Apparently, I could use the help.
Cheers,
Stephen |
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Got a hairdresser friend? That's $100 waiting to happen!
Refer a friend to salonMonster and earn $100 when they sign up for a paid account.
Simple as that. |
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Talking Shop with Liam
Video interviews with our amazing community |
What does real mastery look like in the hair industry?
In this conversation, Liam talks with Joseph DiMaggio about the long, messy, deeply human path from cutting hair on tour to working backstage at Fashion Week, building education systems, mentoring stylists, and creating tools with intention.
Joseph shares how his early background in engineering shaped the way he thinks about haircutting, finishing, education, and efficiency. Instead of chasing shortcuts, his approach centers on repetition, failure, mentorship, and understanding the “why” behind every choice.
This episode goes into the parts of the beauty industry that don’t always get glamorized: the pressure of backstage work, the emotional weight of teaching, the difference between customer service and true hospitality, and why technical skill alone is not always enough to build a successful salon career.
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Saved for Later...Interesting links that crossed our path
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The Unexpected Value of Boredom for Well-Being and Creativity
Visit any park, restaurant, or other public gathering place, and you’ll notice people checking and rechecking our primary mode of entertainment (and distraction): Our phones. We reach for our phones to verify a fact during a conversation. To record our toddlers at the playground. To check our email while waiting for a crosswalk. An infinite amount of information, movies, social connection, and games are at our fingertips. What more could we ask for? |
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Why Rest Is the New Productivity Strategy
In a culture that worships hustle (grinding from dawn to dusk, measuring worth by output) we’re seeing a growing backlash of mental health tolls. Emerging research suggests that rest is not the enemy of productivity, it may be its foundation. In this post, we dive deep into the neuroscience, psychology, and clinical data behind hustle culture, examine its costs, and show how rest can become your strategic advantage. |
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Self-Care for Hairdressers: Let’s Talk About Burnout
“How do we avoid burn out? It's been really, really important for me to take care of myself over the years by taking breaks. I frequently go on vacation. During the summer months, I reduce my schedule, and I retreat. It has also been really important for me to have self-care practices; I practice yoga, I go to the gym, I’m conscious of how I eat – all of those things have been really important because standing on your feet for 8, 10, 12 hours a day is no joke, and it has taken its toll on my 40-year-old body. Taking time for myself has been really, really important, and after work, I don’t do anything. I go home and stare at a wall [laughter]. That is part of my ritual: just be quiet.” |
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salonMonster Radio - Vol 7: Everybody's Floor |
I built this one starting with a single song, "I Like It Like That" by Pete Rodriguez. It's a boogaloo record from the 60s, born out of a moment when Latin rhythm and American soul were colliding in New York clubs and neither side was asking permission. That collision is the whole idea behind this playlist.
So I kept going. Lagos to Rio, Tokyo to Havana, Paris to Casablanca. Different decades, different languages, same pulse underneath all of it. It turns out a good groove doesn't care where it was born, it just wants somewhere to move.
That felt like the right thing to hand you this round. No matter where your chair is, or where your clients are from, or what's playing in the shop next door, we're all working to the same rhythm underneath it. Same long days, same small moments of connection, same floor.
Press play, and let the world come through the speakers while you work.
xo, Annie |
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Honestly? We love making this newsletter.
The feedback we get from this community keeps us going, and putting the Digest together every two weeks is one of our favorite things we do.
Thank you for reading — it means more than you know. |
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