A hairy addition
Penn Commercial students enrolled in the school’s cosmetology program are now under the tutelage of some very well-known “guys” in the hairdressing industry.
The business and technical school in Oak Spring Plaza in South Strabane Township kicked off its Toni&Guy Academy franchise on Tuesday, offering the training of a national school that turns out about 1,400 beauticians across the country each year.
Toni&Guy USA Chief Executive Officer Bruno Mascolo, who attended Tuesday’s event – a “black and white” dress-up affair for several hundred students, faculty and area hairdressers – said his brothers Toni and Guy Mascolo opened a unisex styling salon in a London suburb in the 1960s.
By the 1980s, Toni and Guy were joined by brothers Bruno and Anthony, as their salon business flourished and expanded.
They founded Toni&Guy Academy as a way to train hairdressers with a goal of helping graduates start and grow their careers. In 1983, Guy and Bruno brought Tony&Guy to the United States.
In the 2000s, after some four decades in business, the Mascolo brothers’ hairdressing empire underwent a separation. Toni&Guy USA and the TIGI salon products line went to Guy, Bruno and Anthony, while Toni&Guy Global (except the Americas) went to Toni and his children Sacha and Christian.
Guy, Bruno and Anthony sold the TIGI line in 2009 to Dutch consumer products giant Unilever. Guy died of a heart attack in May 2009.
Bruno said Tuesday that in recent years, he began to increase his focus on the academy business.
“We follow a mission to change the quality of education in our industry,” Bruno said Tuesday, explaining that they want to take students beyond the ability to simply pass the state boards required for them to practice their trade.
“We want them to learn to cut hair, blow dry and do color to build a clientele,” he said.
Mascolo said most of the academies around the country are standalone operations. He said the academy inside Penn Commercial is one of the first to open within a commercial college.
Marianne Albert, Penn Commercial’s vice president of operations, said the school has offered a cosmetology program since 2002. The Toni&Guy Academy is a nine-month course, but Albert said it will enroll new students each month.
Albert and Penn Commercial owner Bob Bazant said that Toni&Guy Academy used its own architect to design a new layout out of the old cosmetology space. Penn Commercial instructors were also trained by the academy.
Bazant said Tuesday he began thinking about buying a beauty academy franchise for the school about a year ago.
After looking at several options, including ones operated by Paul Mitchell and Aveda, he settled on Toni&Guy.
One of the deciding factors was the fact that there is only one other Toni&Guy Academy in Pennsylvania – in Erie.
“We were losing a segment of our (student) population who were moving to Erie and living there for nine months” to attend the Toni&Guy Academy there, Bazant said.
“From my research, they’re second to none,” he said. “They’ve got something special going on.”
That ‘something special’ was a sentiment Bruno expressed just a few minutes later.
“It isn’t just about the money, it’s about creating something for the hairdresser’s future,” he said.