A salon with a twist

Zero One One is remixing the traditional concept of the hair salon, spinning Wednesday nights into gold

By Ross Kennerly

It’s a typical Chicago club scene: A DJ spins house music, beats thumping through heavy speakers. The overhead lights are dim, the wood accents in the room are stained dark like the light. The DJ, wearing a black chapeau on his bopping head, takes a quick sip from an apple martini before changing vinyl. A young woman, flipping through a magazine, waits nearby to get her hair done.

Wait a minute. Back up. What was that?

This isn’t a bar, per se. Zero One One, a small, independently owned hair salon in Wrigleyville, is blending the traditional parameters of both nightclub and salon, molding what started three years ago as a one-beautician operation into a Wednesday hot spot.

“Can I get you anything?” Ray, the receptionist, asks me as I set down my bag on an elegantly upholstered chaise. “We have an apple martini, margaritas...”

I’m offered a drink on the house before I sit down, and I’m not even there for a haircut. This is my kind of place.

Retrofitting the salon scene

“My idea of opening a salon is an old-school shop. People come have fun ... like everybody knows each other,” says Ivana Anderson, the owner of and a stylist at Zero One One. “With a modern touch.”

That modern touch, as it turns out, has taken almost a year to complete. The 29-year-old Anderson, who opened the store in 2002, has been balancing the overhauls to her shop while maintaining her appointments with her clientele, mostly by furthering renovations in the after-hours or on her days off. (On the day I spoke with her — a Sunday — she was varnishing a portion of her floor and touching up some of the paint job.) But, she tells me, it was a necessary move.

When Anderson started Zero One One, there were no hair salons on Clark Street from Krystna to Orbit Salon — basically, nothing from Belmont to Addison. Now, she says, six or seven salons have opened up in the past three years, all with a motif and target demographic similar to hers.

“When the places start looking a little bit too much alike, people have trouble picking and choosing where to go, because they don’t see the difference,” she says.

When she was younger, her idea was to make her salon “more kind of hip and fun.” However, as she matured, her business theory changed from “Okay, let’s party and have a good time” to “Okay, let’s do it right.”

Older and wiser, she realized that what set her salon apart from her competitors is that the stylists she chose to work in her shop were very well-trained, which kept their clientele coming back. Anderson hired an interior designer to transform her motif from a quaint neon green and purple scheme (which she painted herself) with sponge lettering to an Asian-influenced design with a partial drop ceiling and intricate woodwork. Not that her previous design didn’t work; she just felt obligated to give her clients “the right place to be in,” which was also representative of where she was in her life.

Cocktails

From its inception, Zero One One has always served a complimentary drink with any kind of service (and even to visiting writers). It’s a throwback to the original idea of a salon, when getting your hair or nails done was an all-day event. Although, patrons are limited to one drink.

“When we started, we had Fridays and Saturdays with the cocktails, and we had people start getting drunk,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Okay, I can’t have that. I can’t have someone walking out of here drunk and causing me problems down the street.’ ”

In addition to free cocktails, the live music, a more recent development, has also become a draw.

“When it was warm, people were popping their head in and saying, ‘Oh, I see you have a DJ,’ ” says Kyle Brougham, a stylist at the salon.

That quickly turns into questions about what services they offer.

Sure enough, as I sat inside, I noticed a young couple, dressed in a punk style, stopping to peer in through the windows at the DJ before nodding to each other and continuing on.

The idea is not bringing in new clientele quite yet, but, as Anderson admits, the regular customers have started asking more for the Wednesdays.

Music and a cocktail is no substitution for great service, however.

“I’ve stayed with her because she’s really good,” says Charlie Argento, 32, and a six-year Anderson loyalist. “My hair grows really fast, and I’ve got these cowlicks all over the place. I’ll never forget when she started. It was just her, one of her cousins up front, and me. I even went to her house once when she was in between shops.”

Such memories would seem to bolster Anderson’s philosophy of having a personal relationship with the client.

“When I have people come into the salon, they don’t go into Zero One One, they say your name,” says Anderson, a previous four-year veteran of Curl Up & Dye. “And that’s the difference. That is the way we build up the clientele. There is definitely a huge part of the clientele that is not about going and getting a label haircut, but just getting a personal haircut, and that makes a huge difference.”

And what are you drinking, Charlie?

“Vodka on the rocks, of course.”

From war-torn to self-made

Anderson was born and raised in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. After the Yugoslavian Federation began to crumble in the mid-1990s following the fall of communism in 1989, her father traveled with her mother to Chicago to visit an aunt. He was subsequently offered a job and told that his work papers would be available in six months. Six months turned into five years. During the separation, Anderson was working in Belgrade and attending PMF, a college for science and mathematics, where she studied physics.

“I’ve always had two sides of me,” she says. “One was artsy, and the other one was very science (oriented). Growing up, my mom never wanted me to be a hairstylist because she used to be.

“When I came here, I was like, ‘Okay, this is a part of my life I kind of pushed to the side until now,’ and I told my mom this is what I wanted to do.”

By the time that NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999, Anderson had already immigrated to the United States, was naturalized, and had begun taking classes at the Niles School of Cosmetology, where 1,500 class hours are required to graduate. It was like two schools in one, learning English and cosmetology simultaneously.

All of her English is “pick-up English,” something she is self-conscious of, even when it comes to being quoted in this article (“Like, like, like,” she chides herself).

To me, her English is a beautiful pidgin that is discernible only in her grammar (“How you are doing?”); her American accent is flawless.

After passing the Illinois State Board of Cosmetology certification exam, she worked at Curl Up & Dye for four years, then started Zero One One on a combination of saved earnings, a loan from her parents and a few loyal clients like Argento. Since opening, she has seen her number of employees jump from one to five, and her salon’s client roster increase to more than 3,000.

How did she choose her salon’s name? Her hometown ZIP code, of course.

The deejay underground

Anderson is married to a DJ. Her friends are DJs. Her clients are DJs (one of them being DJ Sativa, who spins at Club Moda). DJs — including Justin Long and Frank Q — have always been an integral part of the salon’s charm, though their appearances are an intermittent treat, not the norm. Now, Anderson is hoping to parlay her underused turntables into mid-week success.

Spinning the night I stop in is DJ John Simmons.

“People sometimes call me John ‘Break-It-Down’ Simmons,” he explains.

He’s mixing a little down-tempo, instrumental hip-hop, old school, and some deep house. He’s part of a rotation of local MCs that includes Brenda D, Lady D, Mikela and Adrienne Sanchez, to name a few. Brenda D is also the booking agent.

“Since we started doing Wednesday nights, I actually requested all girl DJs,” explains Anderson. “That doesn’t mean that’s the way it’s going to stay. For right now (it’s just) the girls.”

Simmons, who so far is the sole deviation from the female lineup, and the other DJs are hired by Arman Razavinejad, owner of Music 101, a promotional company and house music label.

“Arman hires them randomly, and then we book them,” says Alison Harman, a Zero One One stylist.

In addition to Simmons’ multiple other gigs (Tuesdays and Fridays at Coobah, Wednesdays at Moonshine, Saturdays at Streetside Café and Lava Lounge, Sundays at Iggy’s and Tsuki Sushi Lounge), he can now add Zero One One to his résumé.

Simmons, who landed the gig because his girlfriend mentioned that Harman was looking for DJs, admits that he’d never heard of a DJ spinning at a salon but believes it’s a “cool idea.”

Is his girlfriend a Zero One One client?

“She will be, I’m sure,” he says.

Click here for more Features