Creating community at the barbershop

From the outside, Bad Company Barbers, at 4505 Central NW, looks like a stucco house, with turquoise wall sconces and a large metal door.

But inside is a modern barbershop with shiny black floors marbled with green, bright green workstations, low-backed couches in the middle of the room, hexagon light fixtures overhead, and a turf wall with the neon Bad Company Barbers logo.

The contemporary décor has a traditional purpose: create a space where customers can chat with each other, chat with their barbers, and enjoy the community that comes with an old school barbershop.

For a barber, the best part of a haircut is when a customer sees their new look in the mirror and their face lights up, said shop owners Miguel Ordoñez, 31, and José Lopez, 29.

“You revive them again. You make their day,” Lopez said.

Ordoñez didn’t plan to become a barber. He was a little lost after finishing his military service, and his sister suggested he go to barber school so he could at least have a stable side hustle. Ordoñez loved the work, and instead of a side hustle, he found a career.

Unlike Ordoñez, Lopez has always loved the art of hair cutting. He’s worked as a professional barber for six years.

The turf accent wall reflects their backgrounds. After his Army service, green is still Ordoñez’s favorite color. And if being a barber weren’t enough work, Lopez is also a landscaper.

The pair met working in a barbershop, and when the shop owners decided to sell the location, the two men took on the business. The space was cramped with cords running everywhere, but Lopez and Ordoñez saw the opportunity to create a business of their own. Lopez purchased the business first and called it Studio 21, then brought on Ordoñez as co-owner.

“Starting off, you can never imagine owning your own shop. It’s hard to imagine owning your own shop because it’s not easy, but all of a sudden, things start coming into place like Tetris,” Lopez said.

Next door, Dolores Silva was considering retirement. In 1980, Silva opened Dee’s Hair Design in Old Town. She relocated the business to Central in 2006 and had served many customers for many years. She was getting ready to retire and gave the building to her son.

Silva noticed the young barbers next door, operating out of a 350-square-foot shop, so she called up Ordoñez and asked him to come by.

“At first I thought it was a scam,” he said.

But Silva just wanted to give some promising young entrepreneurs a boost, the way she’d gotten help when she started her own business. Silva didn’t have a lot of money to open Dee’s Hair Design, but a signature loan gave her the capital she needed.

“I talked to these two young men who were next door, and said, ‘you have such a small shop,’ and they said, ‘this was all we could afford,’” Silva said.

She talked her son into offering the 1,000 square-foot space for the same rent as the smaller shop.

“We need to help one another — I really believe that — if we want the young people to come up,” Silva said.

After securing a new, larger space, Ordoñez and Lopez still had to remodel it from a hair salon with parquet floors and a long row of hair dryers — a space designed to give customers a sense of privacy and sophistication — into something that would feel young and hip. They spent six months working at their first barbershop, then going to the new spot to work on the remodel.

“It was very long days,” Ordoñez said. “Sometimes we used to stay up until 12 o’clock at night or 1 o’clock in the morning and had to come still cut hair the next day. It was hard.”

The original shop was open for a year and half, said Ordoñez, but in July the barbers were finally able to open their newly renovated space, a spot that feels as cool and hip as it is inviting. With the new shop, Lopez and Ordoñez rebranded with a name they chose together: Bad Company Barbers.

The barbershop is family oriented and open seven days a week.

“Moms can bring their kids, dads can bring their kids, or a whole family can come in and it’s going to be a respectful setting the whole time. There’s not going to be any cusswords. It’s going to be very professional,” Ordoñez said.

Customers can schedule appointments online with one of the shop’s five barbers or walk in to the shop.