Santa Barbara News Press: Wine Tasting Room Becomes Pop-Up Location for Displaced Montecito Barber Shop
Photo by: Santa Barbara Shots
Article by Gabe Saglie, Senior Editor, Travelzoo
story published by the Santa Barbara News-Press on 1/22/18
A Different Kind of Buzz: Santa Barbara Wine Tasting Room Becomes Pop-Up Location for Displaced Montecito Barber Shop
When the mud that devoured Montecito oozed onto Coast Village Road, business at Richie the Barber, like at dozens of its neighbors, vanished.
“We didn’t know what we were going to do, we didn’t have a game plan,” says the man who goes simply by Richie, who launched what’s become one of Santa Barbara’s most popular barber shops in 2010. With no time frame, still, as to when storefronts along the popular thoroughfare will be able to reopen, “we thought we’d just have to wait it out,” he says.
Meantime, up the road in Santa Barbara, Jamie Slone’s business was hurting badly, too, and for a while. “During the fires, smoke suffocated the local area, nobody wanted to go out, nobody wanted to come up [from L.A.],” says Mr. Slone, who launched Jamie Slone Wines in 2014 and who runs one of the handful of upscale tasting rooms in the El Presidio neighborhood. “We got a little breather over New Year’s, a teaser,” he continues. “But then this awful mudslide disaster hit, and it’s been ‘game over’ ever since.”
There’s little that connected these local businesses just a few weeks ago. Richie the Barber and Jamie, the vintner, didn’t know each other. But then natural disaster struck them both. And it would take the ingenious inkling of a mutual friend – “Brandon Arlington from CDB Group – love him!” says Mr. Slone – to bring them together and create opportunity for both. For the past week, Richie’s has been running a pop-up barber shop inside Mr. Slone’s tasting room.
With chairs borrowed from a nearby business, the six barbers who work regularly at Richie’s have been back at work, welcoming clients and trimming hair. “Many of our regulars are displaced, and a lot of people aren’t aware yet that we’re here,” says Richie the Barber, so business is not what it used to be. The team – Richie, Alexis, Erin, Stephanie, Jessica and Martine, all Santa Barbara residents – have been doing about 25 to 30 haircuts a day, almost half the 45 to 50 they usually do. Under the circumstances, though, it’s a boon nonetheless.
