October 27, 2025

The Power of Co-Creation: Building Beauty Spaces With People, Not For Them | Dana Fountain | Beauty Platform Creator/She-E-O Pin Me Up Chicago & Your Beauty Blueprint

47 minutes

Today’s episode is a little different— because instead of just talking about business models, we’re walking through them in real time.

While in Chicago, we spent time with Dana Fountain, visionary beauty entrepreneur, author of The Beauty Blueprint, and founder of Chicago’s largest bridal beauty agency, Pin Me Up Chicago. She’s built 7 unique salon concepts, each designed around the stylists who call them home.

In this episode, Dana takes us on a live tour through her 7 salon concepts and her wedding/event venue, Row 24. Along the way, we discuss collaboration, partnerships, and what it truly means to create spaces where stylists can flourish, grow, and thrive.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

🔅Collaboration is a growth strategy, not a personality trait. Dana doesn’t “add people into her business” — she builds businesses with people from the start.

🔅Don’t build a space and hope someone fits — build a space because someone fits. Her salons look different because the stylists inside them are different — the model begins with the human, not the floor plan.

🔅The right partnerships multiply your impact. Partnership isn’t about expansion; it’s about co-creation that produces something neither party could have built alone.

🔅The space is the business model. Each location functions differently by design because each was built around the work, lifestyle, niche, and goals of the people inside it.

🔅Culture isn’t “set” by the owner — it’s co-created. The identity of each location emerges from those who work there, not from a template being replicated.

🔅Leadership is shared, not centralized. Dana empowers people to co-steward the space, which creates stickiness, alignment, and true ownership — emotionally and operationally.

RELATED LINKS

📺See all 7 concepts by watching on YouTube!

👉Follow Dana on Instagram

💡Check out all of Dana's platforms from Your Beauty BluePrint and her salon concepts, to her bridal agency and event space HERE

The Hairdresser Strong Show is all about Salon Owners, Rising Stylists, and Seasoned Stylists sharing their experiences, successes, failures, and advice to inform, educate, and empower their Fellow Hairdresser. We won’t stop until we are all: Hairdresser Strong.

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The views and opinions of our guests are theirs and important to hear. Each guest's views and opinions are their own and we aim to bring you diverse perspectives, career paths and thoughts about the craft and industry so you can become Hairdresser Strong! They do not necessarily reflect the positions of HairdresserStrong.com.

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