Barbershop Nostalgia
Upscale barbershop targets baby boomers and successful men who value the authentic barbershop experience.
Susan Fishman

From the storefront to the back bar, V’s barbershop exudes an air of reminiscence.

In the late 1990s, entrepreneur Jim Valenzuela was inspired by a memory from his youth. The executive director and founder of a large physician’s organization in Phoenix at the time, Valenzuela was looking for a company to buy and happened upon a barbershop in Knoxville, Tennessee.

“It struck me like a lightning bolt. ‘Where have all the barbershops gone?’” he remembers. “I grew up in Tucson and very fondly remember going to the barbershop with my dad. My boy was very small at the time, and I was desirous of having some of that imparted upon him, as well.”

Valenzuela says that nostalgia and the lack of opportunity in the marketplace to do a barbershop in a nice way planted the seed in his mind for a “well-done” barbershop.

“For most guys, the market wasn’t fulfilling that need,” he notes. “Even though there were thousands of barbershops throughout the country, almost all of them were small, dingy, dirty and lacking of any nostalgia. The fast-cut places were hit and miss and had no experience value and a revolving door of people to cut your hair. Or men were going to their wives’ beauty salons, which are almost anti-male — they smell like perm solution, have only women’s magazines and the haircuts are $50 or $60 and just not of any value.”

So Valenzuela decided to pursue his “upscale” barbershop idea and began educating himself and gathering information about the business and the kind of barbershop he’d like to go to.

“I had some design criteria in my mind,” he says. “I wanted it to be a combination of Houston’s restaurant, the Polo store and the downtown Athletic Club where they give the Heisman trophy away. I wanted a place where a guy can go in and get a haircut, shave and shoeshine; smoke a cigar; be around other men and take their boys through that rite of passage that I went through. And I wanted to do it in a very classy way.”

V’s Barbershop was started in Knoxville, Tennessee, but has grown to include a strong base in the Phoenix area and in California.

Valenzuela wanted the experience to be upscale but priced so that it could become a habitual thing and give men a reason to bring their boys in to the shop. (A haircut at V’s Barbershop today costs $21, which includes a shoeshine.) His plan worked. In 1999, V’s Barbershop opened in a small, unanchored, 10,000-square-foot strip center in an affluent area of Phoenix, with limited visibility from the street.

“I realized pretty quickly that if we could make it in this real estate, we had a pretty good chance of making it in nicer real estate.”

And he was right. A V’s Barbershop customer just happened to be developing Kierland Commons, the hugely successful, upscale lifestyle center in Scottsdale, which became the second V’s Barbershop location.

“At the time, there were no barbershops in America going in real estate like this — it was risky and unanchored, with mostly restaurants,” says Valenzuela. “As luck would have it, we went in and the shopping center and V’s just cranked. We had no clue it would be as good as it was and has been.”

The barbershop averages between 1,200 and 1,500 square feet and features a dark wood atmosphere with accents of khaki and black. A heavy, masculine back bar houses the barber stations, complete with authentic barber chairs and shampoo bowls at every station. The shops also feature an extensive memorabilia collection of significant sporting moments, available for purchase by patrons, and some of the bigger stores have a pool table. Every station has a television, which the customer can control, and a tailored sound system will be installed in all the stores, piping in artists, such as Sinatra, Miles Davis, B.B. King and Ray Charles.

On the heels of Kierland Commons’ success, V’s Barbershop opened a third location as part of a redevelopment opportunity in downtown Phoenix. But this store didn’t do so well, according to Valenzuela.

“We realized we were catering to a finite group of people — businessmen — and found out a lot of them get haircuts close to their home on the way to work, after work or on Saturday. So we realized we had to be around more families for the store to be as successful as the first two.”

Additional V’s Barbershop locations include high-growth areas of Phoenix, such as Desert Ridge and Ahwatukee; Lake Forest, California; and Talega, a suburb of San Clemente, California. The company is working on additional sites with franchisees in northern California and other parts of the western United States. With a great deal of interest in the concept so far, Valenzuela says V’s Barbershop will likely double in size in the next 6 months and keep doubling quickly after that. Ideal franchisees are “guys who really want to be in the barbershop business,” he says.

“That’s what has made me successful, and I’ve had fun doing everything from sweeping the floor to shining shoes to greeting customers.”

Valenzuela notes that the barbershop business is different from most in that you normally start out slow and build over time with a recurring stream of patrons every 3 to 4 weeks.  The newer stores are averaging $350 per square foot and trending up toward the $500 range, but the company’s top grossing store did about $700 per square foot in 2006.