Brick has 32 Nail Salons - The Vietnamese Business Success Story

Wow!!! Thirty-two nail salons, isn't that an incredible amount of nail salons for one town? I mean Brick isn't the size of Manhattan. And while some brick and mortar stores seem to be slowly dissolving Nail Salons seem to be on the rise. Are more people getting their nails done? It truly is a weekly or bi weekly appointment for most people. The majority of people that get their nails done have them "filled" with Gel or Acrylic. An outer coating that makes them extremely hard. Either one can run upwards of $35 to $45 just for the coating. Now, if you also opt for the Gel polish, (which lasts longer than regular Polish) it is another $10. If you want a design, that is another $5 for 2 fingers or $10 for ten. If you want a French manicure that is another $10. Make no mistake there are still those that go in for your simple manicure where you dip your fingers in warm water for about $10. But the majority of us go full throttle for the pampering of our nails. Plus let us not forget the tip, which can be in upwards of 20%. Make no mistake this commitment is quite costly and can bring your monthly “nail” bill over $100 if you go twice a month. Albeit I too am a partaker in this cultural pampering. I am amazed sometimes while I am sitting there just how many people are filing in. No pun intended! It is an amazing success story behind these Vietnamese predominantly owned businesses:

The Nail Diaspora: How Manicures Transformed the Vietnamese Immigrant Experience in America

Joseph Babcock

The Daily Beast

These Vietnamese-owned and operated nail salons have become an ubiquitous part of the American retail landscape. As of 2015, there were around 130,000 nail salons in the U.S., according to Nailsmagazine, the leading industry publication. Over 50 percent of all manicurists working in those salons, according to Nails, are Vietnamese. In California, the center of the overseas Vietnamese community, the number is closer to 80 percent.

It’s a remarkable example of enterprising entrepreneurship, especially for a group that began arriving here as refugees after the end of the Vietnam War. As increased competition and oversaturation pushed more and more Vietnamese manicurists to find work in small towns, what resulted is a kind of nail diaspora.—Vietnamese families scattered in the unlikeliest corners of America, places where they’re often the only Asian residents. Today, for example, you can get a manicure at a Vietnamese salon in Minot, North Dakota, Bastrop, Texas, or Beaufort, South Carolina.

The Vietnamese people put more time in at work,Americans, when they see people with really bad feet, they think, ‘Yuck!’ But the Vietnamese people, they are doing it.”

An average Vietnamese nail technician, even one recently arrived in the U.S. and with limited English, can easily make $40,000 a year, a figure supported by Nailsmagazine’s 2016 industry statistics.

This suggests a much different picture of the realities of working in a nail salon from that presented in a widely read 2015 New York Times investigative series on underpaid and exploited nail workers. (That series focused on salons in the New York/New Jersey region, the only two states where the Vietnamese don’t dominate the industry.) By a variety of accounts, Vietnamese entry into the nail business has been a financial boom for the overseas community, allowing both owners and workers to build significant wealth while climbing to the top of a $7.5 billion industry in the U.S., as of 2013. And nails continue to drive the spread of Vietnamese people all over the world.

The phenomenon of moving to disparate towns in search of nail work and less competitive pricing is so common that it has even inspired a fixed term in the Vietnamese lexicon, Lam mong xuyen bang—“Doing nails across states.”

But the Vietnamese, don’t want to live in small towns. In [small towns] you feel like the only Asian. In big cities you don’t feel singled out. In a big city you just feel like you’re part of the rest of the world.

The Vietnamese nail connection dates back to 1975, when the first wave of immigrants began arriving in America after the fall of Saigon. It was around this time that Hollywood actress Tippi Hedren, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, began volunteering at a refugee camp called Hope Village outside of Sacramento. When some of the Vietnamese women in the camp noticed Hedren’s beautiful nails, the actress decided to fly in her personal manicurist. “We were trying to find vocations for them,” Hedren told BBC magazine in 2015. “I brought in seamstresses and typists—any way for them to learn something. And they loved my fingernails.”

After classes with Hedren’s manicurist and a follow-up course at Citrus Beauty School in Sacramento, the initial group of 20 women went on to be the first Vietnamese manicurists to work in the beauty industry here.