“Customers were really keen to change their hair styles”

Against all the odds, this au­tumn Su­sana Cu­quet took the step of mov­ing her hair­dress­ing and beauty salon in Badalona to premises three times the size. When it seemed like every­thing was doomed to fail­ure, she took a step for­ward and grew. “I found that due to the re­stric­tions caused by the pan­demic, the space in my salon did not allow me to at­tract more cus­tomers. That helped me make my mind up, think­ing that if I didn’t do some­thing I’d be stuck. I thought, “Rather than stay­ing like this and being in trou­ble, I’m going to take a chance!” And so she did. She moved, she started again. She dived in head­first: the pan­demic was not going to stop her busi­ness ven­ture. Dur­ing the hard­est times, she says, “I was con­vinced that I would see it out, be­cause I had money saved, and I’ve now in­vested that in the busi­ness. Be­cause if you run out of money, you keep at it a cou­ple more months to use up your stock and then you close.” This Covid night­mare took her by sur­prise, like every­one else. “You lis­tened to the news, and it felt like some­thing hap­pen­ing to other peo­ple... And all of a sud­den you find your­self there and you say, ’This is for real!’”

As soon as she could, she started doing home vis­its, at first, to peo­ple who had dif­fi­culty look­ing after them­selves. “The night be­fore I started doing home vis­its I couldn’t sleep, be­cause of the re­spon­si­bil­ity of hav­ing to take my uten­sils to an­other per­son’s house, en­sur­ing every­thing was dis­in­fected – you try to do it as well as you can, but you still get ner­vous. Lit­tle by lit­tle you get used to the sit­u­a­tion.”

There were many changes when the salon re­opened, due to hy­giene and ca­pac­ity lim­its. “At first, I could only cater for one per­son, and no one else could come in until they left...” It was dif­fi­cult to even cal­cu­late the times. “The night be­fore I re­opened the salon, I didn’t sleep ei­ther, think­ing about how I would do it, what the cus­tomers would be like... Some peo­ple were very, very ap­pre­hen­sive, and oth­ers didn’t re­ally care. We had to do every­thing right and avoid any ar­gu­ments.” As a sec­tor, they did not re­ceive any guide­lines, they made do with the in­for­ma­tion they sent to each other. In Su­sana’s case, the lack of in­for­ma­tion and dif­fi­cul­ties did not make her lose heart. “It takes a lot to make me wor­ried. I guess I think pretty philo­soph­i­cally!”

Her salon has al­ways been a meet­ing point in the neigh­bour­hood, a kind of so­cial cen­tre. It was not un­com­mon to find it full of peo­ple in the past. It has been tough, but the salon com­plies with the new rules. No more mag­a­zines, no more cof­fee... “There have been sad times. A max­i­mum of three peo­ple in the salon, and also talk­ing about the same topic, which every­one has their opin­ion on.” With all the strange­ness of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, there has to also be a cer­tain nor­mal­ity. The prob­lem, she says, comes with re­lax­ing pre­ven­tion mea­sures. On this she is very strict. “When we could have cus­tomers nor­mally, I con­tin­ued to con­trol the ca­pac­ity. I wanted peo­ple to know that there would be no more than two peo­ple, be­cause there was a lot of fear and I didn’t want them to be afraid.”

“As soon as I opened I had work, I can’t com­plain. Cus­tomers were re­ally keen to change their hair styles, after so much time at home, in their py­ja­mas, with­out get­ting dressed... Many have changed their image. There were also those who tried to cut their own hair and it was a chal­lenge to get a good cut out of some of the dis­as­ters!”