It’s a busy Friday afternoon at Ultimate Barber Styles. Three chairs are in play: two guys in their 20s are sitting for super-sharp skin fades and a middle-aged tradesman chats as he gets a standard short back and sides.

An MMA fight plays silently on one TV screen, music videos sound out from another. There’s a rack spilling with rugby and boating magazines and, for some reason, an unopened bottle of a very good single malt on one of the counters. Another customer arrives, gets a fist-bump from his regular barber and takes his place to wait on the couch that runs along the wall.

It’s a little over a decade since Jack – just Jack, that’s what everyone calls him and what it says on his business card – opened his shop at 225 Upper Symonds Street. He retrained as a barber after arriving back from a stint in Perth as a machine operator and deciding that he’d like to stay in Auckland and be near his family. I offer to stand and talk while he works, but he’s happy to pause for a chat. '

“This is my first break since 9am,” he confides as the tradesman heads out the door.

The neighbourhood has changed since he opened, he says. “A lot of new businesses have come through, new faces.” There are also more barbers – 10 shops within a kilometre or two, Jack reckons. “When I opened here, there was one. There’s a lot of people getting into the barber industry. Which is good. We men need to look good, look sharp.”

But Ultimate Barber Styles has been around long enough to have a solid base of regulars. Some come from the gyms in the area, most notably the legendary City Kickboxing: “Carlos, Izzy, Kai and the others.”

When he opened, all Jack’s business was walk-ins. Now, one chair covers the walk-ins and two take the bookings. Regulars come in weekly or fortnightly for cuts, fades and clean shaves, “and we’ve started doing nose and ear, facial. The male grooming industry is getting bigger.”

Is it all blokes?

“We do get a few women through. They ask for a similar haircut to the men – short back and sides. Although there’s a couple with long hair and we do a light trim for them. We welcome anyone through the door.”

Jack is expecting business to grow even more once the Maungawhau CRL station opens. He might have to expand, he acknowledges, “but I don’t want to leave the location. We have a good client base and it’s coming up better and better. Symonds Street is getting bigger.”

Being a barber doesn’t just mean being handy with a trimmer, you need some chat too.

“Different customers want to talk about different things – what’s their weekend look like, what are they up to.”

And that nice bottle of whisky?

“Oh,” says Jack. “That was one of my clients. I looked after him this morning, for a clean shave and he said, ‘what do you drink?’ I said, ‘oh, Johnny Walker or whatever’ and he gave me that!”

Now that is customer loyalty.



Ultimate Barber Styles

225 Symonds Street

Ph: 022 051 5227
Web: ultimatebarberstyles.co.nz

Email: jackbarberd@hotmail.com