Hair-Do Salon

Hair-Do Salon sits along US Highway 98 in Daphne, a full-service hair studio that founder Michelle built as the kind of workplace and salon experience she struggled to find elsewhere in the industry. Since opening in 2008, the salon has grown from a single independent shop into a small family of four locations across Alabama and Georgia, all while remaining independently, and specifically woman, owned.

Michelle started Hair-Do after years of working in salons that did not match the culture she wanted to build. She describes the salon as quirky, alternative, and unapologetically different, a description that shows up in everything from the shop’s aesthetic to the range of services on the menu. Her stated philosophy is direct: no one should ever feel unsafe or unseen in her chairs, a standard she has tried to build into the salon’s culture for both clients and staff.

The Daphne location offers the full range of services associated with a modern hair studio, including vivid and traditional color work, color correction for previous dye jobs gone wrong, precision haircuts, styling and updos for special occasions, and hair extensions. The salon also offers barbering services, curly hair care tailored to textured hair types, and makeup artistry that extends into special effects work and permanent makeup consultations, a broader menu than many single-focus hair studios in the area offer.

The stylist team includes Kristin, an Elite Stylist who also manages the shop, and Caroline, who serves as the salon’s Education Director overseeing ongoing training. Stylists Ahiah, Madalyn Butler-Collins, Ryleigh, and Salina round out the chair lineup, while apprentices Atlas and Jay work their way up under the studio’s mentorship structure. Front desk staff Jill and Jay, referred to internally as Hair Traffic Controllers, keep the schedule running and handle client check-in.

Sustainability plays a role in how the salon operates day to day. Hair-Do is certified through Green Circle Salons, a program that allows the shop to recycle roughly 95 percent of the waste generated by a typical color or styling appointment, including hair clippings, foils, and excess product. That commitment sets the salon apart from many independent shops that do not track their environmental footprint so closely.

Because the salon operates across multiple markets, clients moving around the Gulf Coast region can find a consistent style of service at any of the four Hair-Do locations, though each shop keeps its own local staff and personality. The Daphne studio, positioned along one of the city’s busiest commercial corridors, draws a steady mix of longtime regulars and newer clients discovering the shop for the first time. Appointments can be booked online through the salon’s Meevo scheduling platform or by phone.

That same philosophy carries into the salon’s aesthetic, which the shop describes as embracing alternative style and self-expression rather than a single polished look applied uniformly to every client. Clients booking a color service can expect a consultation aimed at finding a shade and technique suited to their own style, whether that means a subtle traditional color or a more vivid, alternative palette, and the salon’s barbering and curly hair specialties give clients outside the standard cut-and-color mold a place built with their hair texture in mind.

Michelle’s original motivation, building a workplace stylists actually want to work in, continues to shape how the salon hires and trains, with an apprentice program that gives newer stylists a structured path toward building their own client base. For Daphne residents looking for a hair studio with a distinct personality and a genuine independent ownership story behind it, Hair-Do continues to operate much as it did when Michelle first opened its doors, just with more chairs, more stylists, and more parts of the Gulf Coast now within reach.