Fringe Hair Salon

Fringe Hair Salon has operated on 29th Avenue South in Homewood since 2010, when owner Christopher Presley opened the shop after already building more than three decades of experience as a stylist. Presley’s own specialty is color work, and that focus has shaped the salon’s identity over the years, even as the team around him has grown to nine stylists with a wide range of tenure and specialties.

The stylist roster at Fringe covers a broad spread of technical specialties. Diana Ellis works on layered cuts and curly hair texture, a combination that requires understanding how a cut behaves differently on straight versus curly clients. Melanie McDougal specializes in Brazilian keratin treatments, a smoothing service that has become a steady request among clients dealing with humidity and frizz in Alabama’s climate. Jessi Chatham focuses on men’s cuts and pixie cuts, filling a niche that not every color-heavy salon covers well, and Fran Chaiprakob works in dimensional color, building out multi-tonal color work for clients who want more complexity than a single-process dye job.

That range of experience, from five years up to more than three decades among individual stylists, gives clients a wide choice of price points and styles within a single shop, a common approach for salons that want to serve both younger clients experimenting with trend-driven cuts and longtime clients who have followed a specific stylist for years. The salon’s own philosophy, stated plainly on its site, treats hair as an accessory rather than an afterthought, an approach reflected in a service list that spans cuts, color, styling, and chemical treatments rather than specializing narrowly in one category.

Fringe keeps a six-day operating schedule, open Monday through Saturday with extended evening hours on Tuesday and Thursday for clients who cannot make daytime appointments during the work week. That level of availability, six days with two late nights, is more typical of a larger team salon than a single-chair operation, and it lines up with the nine-stylist roster the shop maintains.

The salon sits on 29th Avenue South, one of Homewood’s core commercial corridors and home to a cluster of other independent salons, boutiques, and restaurants within a short walk. That density means Fringe competes directly with several other salons on the same stretch of road, and the shop’s response has been to lean into staff depth and a wide specialty spread rather than positioning itself as a single-owner boutique.

More than fifteen years after opening, Fringe has become one of the more established names among Homewood’s independent salons, with a client base built stylist by stylist rather than around a single signature service. Presley’s own continued presence behind the chair, more than three decades into his career, keeps the shop grounded in hands-on styling work even as the business around him has grown into a full team operation.

The salon’s approach to retail and aftercare products mirrors its service menu, with color-safe and treatment-specific products available for purchase to help clients maintain a keratin smoothing treatment or a fresh color between visits. That kind of retail support matters especially for chemical services like the Brazilian treatments McDougal specializes in, where using the wrong shampoo at home can noticeably shorten how long a treatment lasts. For a salon competing in a neighborhood with as many hair studios as Homewood supports, Fringe has leaned into staff depth and technical variety as its main differentiator, giving clients a reason to choose a specific stylist within the shop rather than simply picking whichever salon happens to be closest to their errands that day. Fifteen years of steady operation on the same block of 29th Avenue South has given Fringe a settled place in Homewood’s small business community, one built stylist by stylist rather than around a single owner’s individual client list.