LEBANON — When Diane Pulley was a teenager, she’d go to class in the morning, then take the bus to hair dressing school in Malden, Mass.
More than 50 years later, she’s still cutting hair.
“What I like about it is that I don’t do the same thing on everybody,” Pulley said. “I like learning all the time.”
Pulley has always worked under a boss, first on Boston’s bustling Newbury Street, and later in the Upper Valley.
But she and her longtime colleague Mary Young recently decided to strike out on their own. A few weeks ago, they left Cord Salon, in Norwich, to start their own businesses inside Hanover Hair Studio, a salon in Lebanon that leases space to independent stylists.
“(I’m) finally free,” said Pulley, who lives in West Lebanon.
She and Young were ready to work for themselves, instead of working on commission, and running their own businesses gives them more control when it comes to the products they use on clients.
A few of their favorites are Hairstory, a sustainable brand, and the hair-dying products at Wella, an international company headquartered in Switzerland.
The two of them have worked side by side for about 25 years, having met while they were both working at We’re Makin’ Waves, now Maven, in Hanover.
“We’re like an old married couple,” Pulley used to joke with Young when the two worked at Cord.
“My kids call her Auntie Di,” Young, of West Lebanon, said. “It’s a family thing.”
While Pulley started cutting hair as a teenager, Young entered the industry later in life, in 2000.
She’d always wanted to be a stylist, but “people were telling me that I just wouldn’t make money out of it,” she said, so she put her dream aside for a job in retail and then in a couple of real estate offices.
Eventually she realized she “wasn’t cut out for that,” she said.
After moving to the Upper Valley from Portsmouth, N.H., she enrolled in New England School of Hair Design while working as a receptionist at We’re Makin’ Waves.
“I’ve always been creative and so this lets me create. It lets me color, it lets me cut,” she said.
Pulley started working at Scout in White River Junction around 2020, and after a brief stint at the salon inside the former JCPenney, Young followed her.
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After a couple years at Scout they both switched to Cord, Scout’s sister location in Norwich.
The way Pulley sees it, the owners of Scout moved her and Young to Cord because they weren’t as young as the salon’s other stylists.
“We were the two oldest ones down there,” Pulley said.
Danielle Casa and Cori Skogerboe, Scout and Cord’s owners, see it differently.
“The stylists expressed reluctance to follow certain protocols at our main salon location and preferred more independence,” they wrote in an email.
“That is not true at all,” Pulley said.
At Scout, stylists are expected to hit certain retail goals and retain a certain number of clients, adhere to the salon’s clean-up rules, and undertake a minimum amount of yearly education, Casa said in a phone interview.
Other stylists at the salon also were resistant to or struggled to meet certain protocols such as the retail goal, Pulley and Young said.
When a space became available in Norwich, Scout’s owners offered Pulley and Young “the chance to relocate to a separate satellite location there, where they could operate with greater autonomy while remaining our employees,” the owners said in an email.
“Employees in a wide range of ages worked at (Cord),” they added.
Cord is currently closed as Young and Pulley were its only stylists when they left.
Over the next few weeks, the salon’s owners plan to convert the space into “rental suites for stylists who are ready to be independent in their business,” Casa said.
It’s the same “booth model” that Pulley and Young are using at their new salon, located at the lower level of 103 Hanover St. The pair lease the space from Yvonne Pelletier who sees her own clients there. The three stylists declined to disclose how much Pulley and Young are paying to lease the space from Pelletier.
Pulley and Young have access to all of the salon’s infrastructure, but they’re responsible for supplying all their own products and handling their own bookings.
“For the booth renter there’s a lot more freedom and flexibility,” Pelletier said. Plus “the income potential is unlimited.”
A basic haircut at Pulley’s business, Diane’s Hair Loft, and at Young’s, Mey Hair at Hanover Hair Studio, is $78.
Young and Pulley originally crossed paths with Pelletier while she was working at We’re Makin’ Waves. A big part of what Pelletier loves about doing hair is the close relationships she’s formed with clients over the years.
“We experience all of the events that an individual goes through in life,” she said.
Pulley and Young have clients they’ve seen for decades, and many have come with them to their new digs.
Susan Shimko, of Quechee, has been going to Pulley since the end of COVID-19. She moved to the Upper Valley from Walnut Creek, Calif. in 1987 and often found it tough to find the right stylist for her thick, straight hair, but Pulley was up for the challenge.
Oftentimes she’ll thin it out and add some layers, and some color to bring out Shimko’s blonde.
She’s “always listening,” Shimko said in a phone interview. “It’s a cooperative session.”
Her time in the salon chair is a bit like “having lunch with a friend,” she said.
“I know about her family…The fun she has with her sisters,” Shimko said. “She knows about my younger daughter and her boyfriend.”
Shimko, who is 67 and retired, also appreciates that she and Pulley are close in age. “That was kind of fun,” she said.
All the experiences Pulley’s collected have made her “a woman with an interesting life,” Shimko said.
“I’m very excited for her in this new place.”