It ended up being one of the more complete conversations we’ve had about Mas Bueno, mostly because the story doesn’t fit very neatly into an elevator pitch. We didn’t start with a detailed plan to build the business we have today. One thing led to another, and every so often, something happened that forced us to learn a completely new part of the business faster than we would have chosen to.

Having almost an hour with Matt gave us room to talk about that in a way we usually don’t get to.

It Started With a Salon

Mas Bueno really starts in 2018, when Kayci took over a small salon on J Street in Midtown Sacramento. At the time, the salon was the business. Retail wasn’t some long-term strategy waiting in the wings. There was simply a large front area mostly used as a waiting room, and after the building owner commented on how much valuable space was sitting there doing nothing, Kayci started looking at it differently.

We knocked down some walls, added racks and displays, and gradually turned the front of the salon into a small boutique. By early 2020, that part of the business was becoming much more serious. Kayci had brought in Free People as our first major apparel brand, and we were beginning to see what retail might become for us.

The timing, of course, was terrible. Less than three months later, COVID shut the salon down.

What COVID Changed

Salon services were far more restricted than retail during that period, and we still had the same lease, mortgage, and other bills we had before everything closed. Retail went from being an interesting extension of the salon to something we suddenly needed to make work.

Kayci started selling clothes live on Instagram and talking directly with customers online. We built out the website, packed orders on our kitchen table, and drove them to the post office ourselves.

At the time, it felt mostly like problem-solving. Looking back, that period created the online side of Mas Bueno that is now a major part of the business. Today we ship worldwide, and on many days ecommerce accounts for a significant share of what we do.

Becoming much more of an online business also made us more aware of what we value about being in a physical store. Kayci had already spent years behind the chair before Mas Bueno existed, and a huge part of that career was building long relationships with clients; some of those relationships have lasted decades.

That naturally carried into the boutique. We now have customers who ask which days certain employees work because they want to shop with that person specifically because they trust and feel comfortable with them.

Why West Sacramento?

A big part of our conversation with Matt was about why we opened another location in West Sacramento. From a purely business standpoint, there were certainly other places where the numbers might have made the decision look easier.

But we weren’t looking at West Sacramento as an abstract market. We live here.

Our kids go to school here. We shop here, eat here, and run into people we know all the time.

Kayci grew up in a very small town where that kind of overlap was completely normal. Her mom worked at the hardware store. A neighbor owned the sandwich shop. Another neighbor owned the Blockbuster. The people running the businesses were the same people you saw everywhere else in town.

That was one of the parts of growing up she remembers most fondly, and there is something about West Sacramento that feels familiar in that way.

Our kids can get out of school, walk over to Nugget for a snack, then come to the shop and do their homework. Their teachers come in. Their friends come in. Our neighbors shop with us. The business is part of the same life we have outside of it, rather than something happening somewhere else.

The West Sacramento store has also taught us that what works in one place doesn’t automatically work in another. When we first opened, we treated it much more like a second version of Midtown. Over time, it became clear that West Sacramento wanted something different from the space, so the store changed with it.

There is still clothing, but there is also the salon in back, gifts, kids' items, pop-ups, floral workshops, jewelry events, art events, and other reasons for people to use the space. It has become its own thing, which is probably what it should have been all along.

The Longer Version

Most people meet Mas Bueno wherever the business happens to be today. There isn’t usually a reason to explain the salon that came first, the pandemic pivot, the online business that grew out of it, or why the two stores ended up becoming so different from each other.

That is what made this conversation fun for us. We got to talk through the whole thing instead of reducing it to a few lines on an About page.

We also spent a good amount of time talking about West Sacramento itself: local businesses, what we would like to see more of here, what makes a community feel like a community, and why the places people say they want only survive when people actually use them.

Thanks to Matt Weaver for inviting both of us in and giving us enough time to tell the story properly.

— Kayci & Tony