May 1, 2017

Meet Michael Baldino of 333 Salon & Barbershop in Back Bay, South End, Fenway and Mission Hill

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Baldino.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Michael. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’ve been cutting hair in the general area since 2005. One of my longtime regular clients, Bruce, owns a flower shop on Mass Ave called Fern. He has several other small businesses in Boston and is always looking for investment opportunities. For several years, every time he was in my chair he’d suggest that we open a shop together; one day he came to me with space to check out on Huntington Ave, and here we are. We started putting money into the space in May of 2014 but weren’t able to open until the end of January 2015, just in time for the worst winter on record. I had just learned more about permitting, fire codes and the inner workings of 1010 Mass Ave than I ever wanted to know, then found myself alone in a 2,200 sq. ft. shop taping signs in the window reading “Free Haircuts – Please Come In and Give Me Something To Do”.

Has it been a smooth road?
Nothing is ever as smooth as one expects it to be, and even then every aspect of opening this business has been way more of a struggle than I expected it to be. The buildout, hiring, management, marketing, branding, accounting, getting listed properly on Google Maps, getting the right point-of-sale and scheduling systems, getting robbed, getting massive unexpected tax penalties, every week it’s another crisis. I feel like that meme with the cartoon dog sitting in hell drinking tea going “This is fine” – and it is, it’s just how it is. It’s comical. Don’t ever open your own brick-and-mortar business.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the 333 Salon & Barbershop story. Tell us more about the business.
333 Salon & Barbershop, like Wu-Tang, is for the children. We do pretty much everything except perms (for now). The most of-the-moment cut and color styles and techniques, design work, hot towel – straight-razor face shaves, all starting at $25 for a women’s or men’s wash and cut.

We also have an in-house pop-up installation, AoA (for Huntington’s nickname, Avenue of Arts – aoasupply.com), that caters to artists working in every medium (particularly graf and street art). I’m most proud of the sheer diversity of the clientele and staff; we’re an island of misfit toys and it works so well despite all conventional wisdom. I wanted to have a place that shared the old European connotation of a salon as a space for the exchange of ideas and culture, and we’ve certainly achieved that.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
People will continue to lack style and torment me with literal requests such as “Give me something edgy, like a faux-hawk.”

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