About Zenkosa

Hi. I'm Kelsey.

I'm a hairstylist. I own a salon suite in Iowa, I've been behind the chair for over a decade, and I built this because I got tired of watching good stylists and good clients fail to find each other.

Here's how we got here.

It started in a Facebook group.

You know the ones. "My autistic son needs a haircut — who's patient?" "I have curly hair, where should I go?" "I want rainbow unicorn hair and I don't want to pay an arm and a leg." (I used to silently pray no one tagged me in that last one.)

I was a hairstylist who had niched down to grey blending, built a solid clientele, and was regularly turning people away because they loved their coworker's cut but didn't want color. The information wasn't connecting. Clients were guessing. Stylists were losing business. And Google Maps was happily showing you the building a salon was in while telling you absolutely nothing about who worked inside, how long they'd been doing it, what they specialized in, or whether they had a Tuesday at 5pm open.

So. Someone needed to fix that.

I looked around.

No one was moving.

Fine. I guess it's me.

A brief, extremely non-linear backstory (skip this if you have somewhere to be, I respect that)

I didn't grow up planning to do hair. I didn't even own a hairbrush until cosmetology school — turns out there are a lot of them, for different reasons. Who knew.

I got here the long way. A false start at college, a financial aid paperwork disaster, a few years of management and waitressing, and eventually the thing people say when they've run out of other ideas: "I guess there's always beauty school."

I went 68 hours a week while waitressing, graduated early, spent four years at a small salon and nine at a larger one, and then made the bold, extremely well-timed decision to open my own salon suite.

January 2020.

Great timing, Kelsey.

Somehow, pandemic and all, it worked out. Six years later I'm thriving — controlling the lights, the volume, the energy, the temperature, the vibe. Fits the puzzle, huh?

But I kept coming back to this idea. This nagging, annoying, will-not-leave-me-alone idea that our industry was being left behind.

Here's what actually makes me angry (and I say this with love)

The beauty industry is worth somewhere around $300 billion. Feel free to fact-check that — I'm a hairstylist, not an accountant. But here's what I know for certain: the people doing the work in that industry are predominantly women and minorities, earning a median salary that requires many of them to work second and third jobs. We make $0 if we're not actively touching a client. Healthcare is largely nonexistent. And yet.

We're also expected to maintain a website, remember to photograph our work, post multiple times a day across multiple platforms, fight algorithms, learn to edit Reels, and market ourselves to followers across the country who will never sit in our chair — all while barely finding time to eat.

For what? Likes?

Meanwhile the consumer is supposed to figure out, from a Google Maps pin, which of the twelve stylists inside that salon does balayage on textured hair, works evenings, and has the patience for a sensory-sensitive client? With what information?

We deserve better tools. All of us do.

So here we are.

Zenkosa has been years in the making. Interviews, classes, courses, tantrums, a neurodivergent diagnosis at 40 that explained a lot in hindsight, and a lot of things that didn't work before they did. Every roadblock somehow made the next version better.

I don't want this to be another monthly subscription slowly bleeding your bank account while you try to remember your login. I want this to be an actual investment in your business — one that makes you wonder why it didn't exist already.

Because it should have.

— Kelsey

Founder, Zenkosa | Hairstylist

After thought (I have a lot of those)

What the actual heck does Zenkosa mean?! Well let me just tell you: it is HARD to name a business. Special shout out to domain pirates. May your pinky toes be regularly stubbed and your straws have tiny slits in them. Any word or combination of English words — spelled accurately or incorrectly — has been snatched up by people who hold those domain names hostage until you pay them a stupid amount of money. Remember above where hairstylists aren't the highest paid? I didn't have the $10k to fork over for the web domain of my original idea, Beauty Index. So after weeks of group chats with sisters and trusted advisors (AKA clients with skills and patience) and a whole lotta bad ideas, I landed on Zen — to remind us all that this platform is supposed to make our lives easier — and Kosa, which is Croatian for hair. A little nod to what got me here. Am I Croatian? Do I speak Croatian? Absolutely not. But Zenpelo didn't have quite the same ring to it.