A beautiful quarter century

COEUR d'ALENE - Marge Johnson saw a gap in the marketplace 25 years ago and decided she knew just how to fill it.

On July 15 she and daughters Shanda Johnson and Shelly Weholt celebrated the anniversary of the opening of Centre Beauty Supply in the same store Marge opened up in the Fairgrounds Center all those years ago.

"We were the first real retail store in the Northwest," Marge said.

A hairdresser for 10 years before opening Centre Beauty Supply in 1985 at 4055 Government Way, she thought women should to be able to do more for themselves.

"I could see a need for the public to be able to take care of themselves, because of the cost of services," Marge said.

In one of those rare business models, the retail concept of beauty supplies turned out to be successful from the beginning, and grew steadily.

"I don't think there were any rough patches at all," Marge said.

Not in the business sense, but on New Year's Day, 2006, their in-house hairdresser, Vonette Larsen, was killed in a road rage incident in which she was run over by the driver of a Chevrolet Blazer.

"She was just like a daughter to me," Marge said. "We'll never forget. We cared about her so much."

Robert Heilman is the hairdresser at the shop today, and she and her daughters feel the same way about him.

"Vonette was family, too," Marge said. "Family is people you care about."

It was not a sure thing when she started the store. Not every salon owner and worker in town was enthusiastic about the idea of someone catering to what they call the "do-it-yourselfers."

"We always had to be careful we didn't step on anybody's toes and take their customers away," Shelly said.

But once the hairdressers in the area realized that was not happening, they supported the shop.

"Change is always difficult," Marge said.

Salon business is about 25 percent of their business, even with other wholesale stores opening in the meantime. But the rest is private parties, and it's not just women.

Nail supplies are part of the inventory, and a few musicians in town are among their customers, replacing their guitar picks with artificial nails for finger picking, Shelly said.

But colors, perms, conditioners and the rest of the plethora of products aimed at maintaining beauty are primarily a female thing.

"I've been coming here forever," said Marlene Fletcher, a former hairdresser - "now I'm a do-it-yourselfer"- shopping at the store on Friday. Or at least 15 years or so. "I started out with conditioner, now I'm buying hair color," she said, pointing at the specific brand she bought her first time there.

But after raising, and taking care of the hair care needs of, nine children, along with countless friends, she still needs the help Centre Beauty Supply provides.

"Robert does a great job on my hair," she said. "Everybody here is very friendly and helpful."

Marge said part of the reason for their success is working with the industry to make sure her customers get what they need.

"Many times I send them to the professionals," she said. "If what they are going to do is going to be worse than what they have, it's better to have a professional help them."

But another reason is that all the products in the store are professional grade, Shelly said.

And there have been challenges in the business, but not of the business variety, her mom said. They were more in the line of things gone wrong on the home front. But the reaction was usually worse than the problem, Marge said.

"We get a lot of calls for help, 'my hair is orange. What they define as orange is not necessarily what we consider orange," she said. "What they consider green is not always green. It is usually not as bad as they think. "

And the occasional challenge is not a bad thing, she said.

"People call and say, 'Hey, I got fixed by so-and-so at Centre Beauty Supply,'" she said.

And odd colors are part of the game, and not just for people.

"We sold bleach to the people who took care of the Budweiser Clydesdales," Marge said. "We sold blue hair color to color a cow blue for Paul Bunyan Days."

Show dogs sometimes get treated with a tinge of blue, which whitens up the fur, she said.

"People call all the time with strange requests that are not so strange," Marge said.

The door of the salon is decorated with newspaper ads and stories of the women over the years as they reminisce with old and new shoppers about Centre Beauty Supply.

"We have had a lot of customers since Day 1," Shelly said. "They watched us get older, and we watched them get older."