L.A. Dreams and Hundred-Dollar Jeans
His father was a corporate executive. His older brother is a chemical engineer. Paul Catlett finds success and happiness by straying from the path.
By Tiesha Miller
(page 1 of 3)
Paul Catlett runs a little salon. Well, it used to be a little salon, but this past year it turned half a million dollars in revenue. How a man with L.A. dreams and hundred-dollar jeans doesn’t really touch that money is the story of Catlett. He started eight years ago with $2,000 and a two-station salon in downtown Springfield and worked his way up. Each time he earned a profit, he put the money right back into the salon. He isn’t modest about his story or his successes, and he doesn’t seem to be wearing false confidence, though he does wear a fair amount of confidence. Catlett, a 30-year-old hairstylist turned Angeleno turned Londoner turned Springfield entrepreneur, openly shares the story of making Studio 417 on McDaniel Street into the über-successful, über-chic (our words, not his) salon that it is now.When I first met the slender, 6-foot-2-inch hairdresser, he was finishing highlights on a middle-aged male client and was wearing jeans with rips of the expensive variety; a black T-shirt, which was neither loose nor tight; and yellow-tinted sunglasses. Catlett looks like a trendster yet talks with a little twang, and if you hang around long enough you’ll find out that twang is a result of growing up in southwest Missouri. And as we delve deeper into the innerworkings of Catlett, you’ll see that his accent versus style is the tip of the iceberg.
He’s the kind of guy who you’ll see out with his tattoo artist, sharing drinks and tipping big. He’s the kind of guy who will go to India with his church to help build a medical facility ’cause, “When you get a calling from God, you go.” He’s the kind of guy who has big hopes for Springfield’s downtown. He loves the rough and rugged outdoors and has two dogs at home: Butters, a Yorkie, and Lillian, a Chihuahua. He believes in hard work and image and marketing. If he likes a person, he’s going to say so. His uninhibited confident regard is maybe how he’s the kind of person who can start with very little and begin a salon—without any formal business training—and just work hard until it grows. He also knew when and to whom he should ask questions. He got a good lawyer. He got a good accountant. This year is going to be a bit different because 2007 is the first time he’s going pay himself. He’s going to upgrade from the rusted 1989 black Ford farm truck, and he’s going to spend some more time with his wife, Hannah.
An instantaneous teleportation to some coastal trendy hotspot occurs when walking though the doors of the recently remodeled Studio 417. Somewhere, a little Los Angeles and a little New York were married. Catlett says it isn’t all smoke and mirrors; he has the services that stand up to the look. His salon is teeming with several perfectly blonde, fittingly L.A./New York hybrid hair stylists and has an atmosphere much different than any salon in 417-land.
The architecture and design of the salon, which was revamped and unveiled in September, came by way of longtime friend Matthew Hufft, a mover and shaker in the architectural community who built the Line House for his parents at age 25 (profiled in 417 Magazine, August 2006), a guy who has begun his own firm just as he hit the 30 mark. Hufft says he is not surprised one bit about Catlett’s success. “It’s been amazing,” says Hufft, who was also Catlett’s best man. “There is a side story of architecture. Art is really important to him. We’re both aesthetically driven people. Paul and I look through the same glasses. I showed him [originally a drawing of the salon] that was much more tame, and he actually encouraged me to go bigger—to think about making more of a statement. Typically it works the other way… that the client looks to tame it up. Paul was actually pushing me.”
Catlett and his clan are sort of this epicenter of cool in downtown Springfield, though that seems ineffectual because Springfield isn’t a metropolis whose centripetal force is its downtown. All the same, Catlett has faith in downtown’s growth potential. He especially had faith in it when he decided to set up shop there, and everyone said that because of this he was bound for failure. “Downtown Springfield is a suppressed area in the fashion sense,” Catlett says. “You take a community that never had a cool salon or a cool place to buy clothes or a good vintage store five years ago, and all the sudden you start putting stuff like that in, and it’s evolving at a pretty high rate. That’s a huge transition in a market this size.” He says Springfield is a thirsty market for “cool,” and just because modern/contemporary/chic isn’t rampant doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have an anxious audience.
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