Grafton business park salon a dream come true

A business park may not be where you expect to find a salon, but for Lia Coker and Angela Uselding, owners of Salon Maven in Grafton, it’s the right place to be.

“It’s a beautiful area,” Uselding said. “These companies take care of their property.”

The large windows in the salon at 2225 Dakota Dr. allow plenty of natural light to flow into the salon, she said, and give customers and stylists views of the outdoors. 

“I love it,” Coker added. “Downtown Grafton (where they previously worked at Studio Forte) was so congested. It was hard to find parking. Now we actually have a handicapped parking spot.”

And, she noted, there aren’t any other salons on the east side of Grafton.

The women, their families and co-workers worked hard to convert the building, which had been a training school for three years and then vacant for eight years, into a stylish salon.

“We didn’t just buy an empty salon and fill it. We did this. We had our ideas. We had a vision,” Uselding said. “We walked in and said, ‘We can do this.’”

Coker noted that after they signed the lease, they brought their families in to see the space.

“They were kind of chuckling,” she said. “They didn’t get our vision.

“There were so many walls and a dropped ceiling. It was all carpeted. Angela and I put our muscles into this. We learned how to use a lot of power tools. It was a lot of fun to do it.”

The women did what work they could — a friend in construction did the lion’s share of the project — and since they were still working at their former salon, they spent numerous nights and weekends on the renovation.

“For a while, we forgot what our houses looked like,” Coker said.

Work started in March, and the bulk of it was completed by mid-July. Studio Maven opened its doors Aug. 4.

The salon is spacious and open, and the natural light that flows in makes the black-and-gold color scheme shine. Gone are the dropped ceilings, replaced by an exposed ceiling that’s painted black. 

The hardest part, the women agreed, was coming up with a name for their business.

“It was actually harder to come up with a name for the business than it was to come up with names for my four kids,” Uselding said.

There were a few rules for the new name. Coker said she didn’t want to use the word beauty, and Uselding didn’t want to use the work studio.

“We wanted something different,” she said. 

They had pages of names they considered before Uselding’s husband suggested using the word maven, which is defined as one who understands or an expert.

The word clicked, and the women quickly settled on Salon Maven.

“It just felt right,” Uselding said.

The salon is the culmination of a dream that the women — childhood friends who lost touch and then reconnected while working at Studio Forte — have had for some time.

“I love this industry,” Coker said. “I can’t imagine doing something else.”

She said she’s always wanted to be a hairdresser.

“At 12, I was cutting and coloring and braiding my cousin’s hair,” Coker said. But when she was a teenager, she didn’t trust herself enough to follow through with beauty school.

“At 29 I woke up and thought, ‘It’s time,’” she said. “I need to follow my dream.”

Uselding began working as a receptionist at Cost Cutters before she was 16, graduated from high school a semester early and started beauty school at 17. 

“It felt right. I loved the environment,” she said. She worked at a number of places, took time off to raise her son and then found her place at Studio Forte.

The women said they were happy there for a long time but had reached their potential there.

They began talking about creating a salon together, and in December one of Coker’s clients suggested they look at a space she owns. The women quickly snapped it up.

A couple of the stylists they worked with approached them to see if they could rent space at the salon, creating the core group of stylists at Salon Maven.

That group will expand in September when an aesthetician joins the staff. The women said they have two other suites available and they hope to fill them with people offering massage or Botox services.

“It’s been a fun journey,” Coker said. “I can’t wait for the next 25, 30 years here. The support from our families has been nothing less than amazing.”

The support of clients and the Village of Grafton, which provided them with a revolving loan fund loan, has also been amazing, the women said.

Most important, they said, is the support they draw from each other.

“I could not have done this with anyone else,” Uselding said. “We truly are a really good fit. Where I have strengths, she has weaknesses. Where she has strengths, I have weaknesses. We’re a team.”