Anyway, while going through and sorting I’ve come across a bunch that  we have taken when a stylist has gone way above what a typical salon would do. As we keep growing and trying to do our best for our clients, I will sometimes have people ask how much a hair cut is.  When I say $22.00 with a free train ride they gasp.  BUT, if you use our cash discount it pretty much equals to the amount you would pay at a quickie haircut place. Sometimes you end up getting above and beyond service from these stylists, look what we end up doing that those places don’t do….

I know I waited a few days to give thanks for a wonderful 2011 and to wish everyone a great 2012, but things have been a little crazy and as you know by now, I’m not the best social media person. But I’m working on that. New Year resolution stuff, that will hopefully last at least a few months… ha-ha-ha!

But thank you for giving us a great year. We’ve weathered so much in the last few years. We’ve gone through some changes (and continue to change) and we are all so totally grateful that you have been with us through the ups and downs and that you continue to hang in with us as we slowly change and morph into a different kind of place. 

You’ve helped us launch a punch card program this year, that we continue to try to make work for you and for us (thus the longer than normal re-order time), the new ones are coming soon and we have kept everything on record so no worries, you will get all of your punches due to you while we work on these.  AND you helped us win King 5′s Best of Western Washington!! That was an awesome highlight for us, for sure.  We get to see your children every few months and watch them grow and change into little humans. We watch you through pregnancy, to having babies, to watching these little ones grow to talking, walking humans with a voice! 

BUT, I think, looking back on 2011 the best thing that happened for us was the amazing donations that came from you all during Operation Airlift Japan!  The donations filled half of our store and you all showed me why we do what we do.  Why we hang in and keep the doors open.  We have AMAZING customers and clients that are giving, compassionate and “family”.  That was my highlight. I thought we would see a little corner of gently used stuff and people showed up with boxes of new food, clothes, underwear and toys… instead we saw our store fill half way up and people coming through the doors through the days with their donations in hand. It was truly awesome. For that sight and display of compassion, I am most grateful.

So, thank you. Words can’t express how grateful we are to have you in our lives.  I’m excited for the year ahead. New punch cards, new salon space for older kids and adults, parties, classes and some other special things popping up! We can’t wait to visit with you all during 2012 and see what the year not only brings us, but what it brings for you!

We hope that 2012 brings you and your families all the joy, health, happiness and blessings that you deserve!

PS….. thank you Dena R. for solving the mystery of the overnight decoration of our sad little “Charlie Brown” tree! That was awesome, you crack us up!

Thank you Dena! A sad tree made happy.

She is visiting with us because her husband is so busy right now, she needed to get out of the house. So we said come on over and you can meet some of the kids your husband goes to see on Christmas Eve. She is a very sweet woman AND she brought cookies for all the children. Don’t forget to bring your camera. I mean, ho

often do you get to meet Santa’s wife afterall…..? Not often and she is totally worth meeting.

Isn't she adorable?

I do have to laugh because the only part that aired of me saying anything was the part about the Blue Angels Jet.  Which was 100% true.  When we decided to open a salon I started looking around for chairs and when I saw the Jet I just knew that we had to have it and we had to choose everything else around it.  That would be the one chair that would be my prized possession in the shop.  My brother, who is very important to me, is in the Army.  He is the exact opposite of me, a career army pilot that has his act together all the time.  He was doing air shows at the time as the pilot for the Golden Knights, the United States Army parachute team.  They would travel with the Blue Angels and we were lucky enough to see these shows from amazing spots, like the runway.  Once in a lifetime opportunities that made me see our military in a whole new way.  So the chair, it is my special chair.  It has been through its share of combat itself, broken windshields, broken seat belts… seats, wings.  We keep patching it back together because you can’t replace any of the parts anymore.

As for what might have been left out.  I think they covered it all.  They took what I said and interpreted it much better than I could have said myself.  It was a really hard interview to do because to me it feels like I am going to my second house (it even looks like a house) and it feels like I have friends stopping by all day.  I don’t get as much work done there that I wish I could, mostly because I am having so much fun visiting with the people I know. So to me, although I can get stressed out sometimes (I’m human), It feels like I just get to see my friends all day and make new ones too. It isn’t like “work”, but then again you know what they say… if you love what you do it doesn’t feel like work. So that makes sense.  I’m glad we won, especially for the girls because they work hard and deserve it.

For me when I sat quietly and thought about the whole thing I realized that we are a business.  A legitimate business that people really like. That is huge.  But I still can’t believe it.
               

When we opened our doors almost five years ago we were located in a different space, just a few doors up on the boardwalk.  I rented a space that was already a children’s store before and started from scratch.  I can still remember our first sale, a Baby Dry Goods blanket for about $35.00, I was so excited!  But when we rented that space there was an upstairs that we had to rent as well, at the time the Country Village Management rented it as a package deal (now it is several different businesses). We knew that we couldn’t use it as retail space and the previous owner used it as a Princess party space and offices for a nanny placement service, which wasn’t an option for us.  So I thought, I drive Bella all the way to Redmond to get her haircut and there is kids place to take her around Bothell, so we thought we should open a salon up there.  We named it Bella and Max, Bella after well… Bella, my oldest daughter and Max, after a cat we had at the time.  The name was to represent both girls and boys. We hired a gal to work up there and crossed our fingers and hoped it would work.  Our first year we were nominated for Best Children’s Clothing and Best Children’s Haircut for best of Western Washington, every year we would come close in both categories but we never won.  Until this year!

I have to say, I was really hoping that we would win this year.  Because we have weathered a move (even though close people thought we were gone), a declining economy and our clients growing up and out of our little cars and Blue Angels Jet.  It has been a rough couple years.  We have had growing pains, going from two stylists to four.  We know we need more and are working on it, but I always want to find the perfect people who will treat your children well, do a great job and stay around long enough that the kids grow to trust them and build relationships.  That can be a difficult task.  I also always worry about keeping everyone happy.  I love happy clients and happy employees.  I wanted this win for Alison, Katy, Marci and Natalie… because they work hard and they deserve it.  We followed the voting and knew we were in first place by just a few percentage points when they shut the visibility of the results down for the last week or two.  We could only keep telling people we were hoping for votes and tell them we were nominated.  Then the call came….

I answered the phone on Tuesday, October 11th… it was Kim from King 5 calling and said we won and could they stop by around the time we open to film a segment… .I think I screamed.  Out loud.  In her ear.  Poor Kim, I am so sorry.  But I was SO excited!  We talked a bit, I screamed some more… but then I realized, the salon was in the process of getting moved around and we had one day to whip it in shape.  Anyway, when they came in they were so nice… she was so, so nice.  She made us all feel very comfortable and at ease. 

That’s all I am going to write for now.  I’m getting nervous and excited at the same time.  In one hour we will be on Evening Magazine.  I can feel in my bones my nerves…. oh gosh.  In the morning, or later tonight, I will sit and write what I wanted to say.  What I might have forgotten to say.  It all happened so fast and when a camera is pointed at you (well me at least), it can be nerve-wracking. Oh geez, I think I’m breaking out in a cold sweat.

I had this discussion over a month ago with the branch manager of the Bank of America where I have my accounts, because I had read an article that Wells Fargo was charging $3.00 and Chase bank has rolled this program out on the east coast to see where their sweet spot is going to be (between $5.00 – $8.00 per month).  This isn’t a Bank of America program, this is a bank (any bank) program.  He told me that this is just what they have to do, WAMU started the “free checking” programs that caused all the other banks to follow suit and they did that based on their mortgage department being able to make up for those bank account fees, look where they ended up. Banks have to pay for their buildings, for their employees, receipt paper, supplies, fraud protection etc etc. He asked how would they pay for that? Now, don’t get me wrong I think banks make enough as it is. Trust me.

Congress has enacted a few bills that are causing banks to “lose” money.  They ended the days of $35.00 overdraft fees (you know, the ones where they let you use your debit card all weekend and on Monday morning they take out ummm… let’s say your light bill for $200.00 on auto-pay and then let all the $5.00-$10.00 transactions follow, causing you the consumer to rack up a bunch of $35.00 fees). This was known as “High to Low Sort Order”, a revenue generating bookkeeping device. To read about a lawsuit that Wells Fargo customers brought against them click here.  The revenue generated from overdraft fees had been rising, it was estimated at $38.5 billion in 2009 – up from $36.7 billion in 2008, when the combined net income for U.S. banks was just $10.2 billion.  Five percent of customers account for 60 to 70 percent of overdraft fees. So really, the overdraft fees banks were collecting came from the people hardest hit by this economy, the ones that didn’t have the luxury of extra money in the bank that were just getting by as it was. This bill was enacted to protect the consumer, because the bank’s most profitable customer was not be the guy with the $200,000 in the CD it was the guy who banked on today’s check getting cashed tomorrow.

The second thing that hit the banks was the legislation protecting merchants. Us. Me. The small and big businesses alike.  The kicker is, they are saying that imposing a fee to consumers is a reflection of Congress passing the Frank-Dodd act, limiting what banks can charge for “swipe fees”.  Click here for an article about this subject. But that is NOT entirely true at all. While banks are reducing the “swipe fee”, I just received an email that my merchant processing is RAISING the percentage fee.  There are two fees that happen at a register, swipe fee and processing fee.  The swipe fee is the standard fee to swipe the card.  Currently I think we pay about  25 cents, just to swipe the card. Then there is the processing fee.  That can range anywhere from about 2% all the way up to about 7%-8% of the total transaction.  In our case that is 7%-8% of the item, service, tip and sales tax. Yup, the whole total.  The state of Washington does not even let us write that fee off for sales tax, so with sales tax we currently pay to collect tax for the state. Not fair. I don’t even want to collect tax for them, nevermind have to pay to do it.  Then there is B&O tax, which is a tax to just do business.  That is a few percentage points per transaction to have your doors open. Oops, I digress. This is a post on bank fees not tax. But if a card is used, bank fees are charged to collect all these hidden taxes (that we do not pass on to our customers)  So the banks take a percentage on whatever is swiped, that’s my point.  With that point comes the fact that I just received an email that they are raising that. Last year’s financial reform bill ordered the Federal Reserve to crack down on debit card swipe fees, a $16 billion pool of money from which $8 billion flows to just 10 banks. As a concession to Wall Street, credit card fees were left unscathed (here is a great article that explains it on Huffington Post) it is a long article, but very good if you want a better understanding of the big picture.

I know this is a long post.  But as a small business owner I value all of our customers a great deal.  I do.  So much so that we are rounding the corner to our five-year anniversary in January and I have not raised our prices since the day we opened. When we opened it was a no brainer to make the financial and emotional investment of opening Bella and Max. The economy was thriving, people had jobs and five years ago I would never have imagined that people, whole families (our customers) would struggle with jobs, their mortgages and putting food on the table.  But I see it all the time and it makes me sad.  Yet, I too am a family embedded in this community and making my way trying to survive. My decisions are difficult.  I have a family, I provide jobs to (right now) four people who, in turn, contribute to their families.  I pay rent to a company that provides shop space to other people who are trying to make their way, but they need their rent to pay their mortgage.  Currently we have well over 3,000 people in our client data base, all that would directly be affected should we raise our prices.  Some of the decisions that I have to make don’t affect only me, I honestly realize that there is a huge… HUGE trickle down affect to the decisions I make. If I raise our prices by say $2.00 to cover the fee increases we are about to experience I know that means we could lose clients, that our stylists could suffer on their paychecks, that we might not be able to grow and expand further, that I wouldn’t be able to pay our rent and we could close our doors. I wouldn’t be able to pay my own mortgage and feed my kids and four people would be out of a job…. and the trickle goes on. So this long post about people being upset about an additional $5.00 to have a debit card, is also a post on how this is going to affect us because they are raising their fees to merchants, higher than $5.00.  Currently we pay anywhere from $500.00 – $800.00 in credit card fees alone. That just went up.

So I realize that charging a fee to use a debit card isn’t as easy as snapping my fingers. Or raising our prices is as easy as changing a number on the computer and saying ok, there you go it is what it is.  My business is small and it is about the relationships we’ve built and the people who walked in the door as clients and have become friends. People I’ve grown to care about, with kids we all love to see as they grow.

So, I think in this post I have given you all the information I can.  There are links for more information (these links affect your life outside of Bella and Max not just here, but it is good information about debit cards and what is going on), videos and some statistics.  I’ve asked for feedback on Facebook and now I am asking for it here.  Would you be opposed to going to a cash only way to pay here so we can keep our prices the same?  Same for cash, that is.  I’m not sure that I can say the same for debit and credit cards.

I can’t get this video to embed, but please take a peek at it. Government says we have a choice, so this is their take on it. They say to small business, you don’t have to take cards, you have a choice. Take cash, take checks or take cards. All of the above or just some of the above. We (us, Bella and Max) have a choice and if we do the right thing, we can do it AND we can save our customers money.  That’s really what it is all about, creating a win/win situation for all of us.

It seems kind of silly, asking people to vote and getting all excited about a little contest.  Every year we eek out a top 5 spot, but this year… this year, I really want to see us win.  I think because we (and when I say we I mean all of here at Bella and Max) have been working super hard and really we are trying to be the best we can be.  Trying to providde good pricing, good customer service and to help our clients in the best ways that we can.  It just seems like for oncee, for the girls and for me it would be nice to get this honor for once.  You know, to hang the little red plaque up and actually say, we won this thing.

Here’s a link to vote…. 

Anyway, with that said, it is time for back to school haircuts. In seven {7} days Northshore School District resumes classes or the 2011-2012 school year.  I don’t know about you but I’m not even close to being ready yet.  I have two daughters, one starting 5th grade and one starting kindergarten.  That is sad for mt, my baby.  But that is a whole other blog post. 

It is time to make your hair appointments if you want your little one to be all spiffy and cleaned up for school.  The schedule is already getting full and we are finding things booked up with three people working.  If you want to get your appointment {and especially if you have a particular person in mind to do it} you should go to our website and make your appointment(s) as soon as possible.  Schedulicity, the program we use makes it quick and easy.

No, we don't sell lunch boxes yet, but aren't these cool?

Getting ready for Locks of Love Donation

This little girl was SO sweet! She was a walk-in on Saturday and she wanted to keep her Rupunzel hair and just get a trim.  Her mom had done some owrk with St. Jude’s Hospital and explained to her that if she agreed to cut her hair ten inches a child with Lukemia would get hair.  So, she agreed.  At first she was sad that she had cut so much hair off.  She went with her mom and sister to have a snack and come back for her sister, Camilla’s haircut and she was super happy.  She is just awesome and has done such a great thing for a little girl or boy.  She had thick, thick hair..

 Call us anytime about Locks of Love.  You have to give ten inches of hair minimum, but it its totally worth hit.  A little boy or girl is going to be very lucky to get Isabella’s hair!

Isabella, job well done!

An excerpt from Tina Fey’s new book Bossypants…. looks like a must read book! I wonder what other genius she dishes out? Right now I am reading Super Rich by Russell Simmons (of Def Jam Records fame and a great book so far about being spiritually Super Rich – not money rich),Tina Fey will probably be next on the reading list.

This ‘prayer for a daughter’ isn’t just for her daughter. It’s for anyone who has a daughter, thinking about having a daughter or has been a daughter. I think it applies to anyone with a child, boy or girl.  Fun and worth the five minutes.  It certainly is making the rounds on the Internet, but I wanted to share.