Jamika Phillips opened Shades The Nail Bar in the Sienna area of Missouri City, Texas, in January 2022, and she had been writing down names for it since about 2000.
Phillips spent more than twenty years in corporate America, mostly in software engineering and global process management, with a background in computer science. The salon was never a passing thought. She has pages of notes from around 2000 listing the names she liked. “I have notes back from probably 2000 where I would think about the names of the salons that I wanted,” she said. “I still have these pages, and I look back at them and thank God for them every day.”
She got licensed while she was still working. “I would work from 9 to 5. I would go to school from 5 to 9 Monday through Friday, on Saturdays from like 8 to 2,” she recalled. She and her husband moved to Houston, and she was about a week from signing a lease when the pandemic arrived. She said she was glad she had not signed it. She opened two years later, after a layoff, having driven past an available space in Sienna, pulled over and called the number on it.
People told her not to. “There were a lot of people that said, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?'” she said. “There’s a lot of competition. There are nail salons every two miles from each other.” Then the sentence underneath all of it: “Typically, not a lot of Black people own nail salons.” She said, “I refused to let that stop me.”
What she built is acrylic free, working in builder gel, polygel and Gel-X, and it is sold on sanitation and nail health rather than speed. Her nail technicians are Black, Hispanic and Asian, which she says was the point. “I wanted shades to represent not just the nail polish colors,” she said, “but I wanted it to represent different shades of nail technicians as well as clientele.” LeeVera Smith, a business adviser with the Small Business Development Center, helped her write the plan, and a video by the creator Andrea Hilton brought a wave of new clients. “She was a blessing to my business,” Phillips said.
Four years in, what she describes is less a salon than a room people keep coming back to. “We’ve seen them have babies. We’ve seen them lose their babies. We’ve seen them lose their parents,” she said. “We’ve seen marriages, divorces. I mean, we are there for them.”
And she keeps returning to the money. “Black women spend tons of money in the nail care industry,” she said. “So it was something that I said, we got to do this.”
