Members of the Trachouse Beauty team. Trachouse Photo.
When Renee Loren Brown’s mom stopped doing her hair in elementary school, she didn’t know it was the beginning of a movement. Three decades and one giant leap of faith later, she’s turned a hair salon into a thriving third space—and is thinking about how to keep it soaring into the future.
Brown, a daughter of New Haven who now works and lives one town over, is the founder and owner of Trachouse Beauty Salon, which since 2016 has used hair and beauty as a platform for self-love, public health literacy, and female empowerment. As she celebrates 10 years this week, she is looking back at the growth of her small business, and thinking about what the next decade can hold.
An anniversary gala is scheduled for this Sunday, April 26, at Anthony's Ocean View at 450 Lighthouse Rd. in New Haven. Tickets and more information are available here. The salon, which has changed location multiple times since opening, is currently located at 39 Frontage Rd. in East Haven.
“It was just a way for me to connect with other women and girls,” Brown said on a recent episode of “Arts Respond,” a collaboration between WNHH Community Radio and the Arts Paper. “Women love getting their hair done. They love makeup. They love nails. All the things. But behind that is, they just want to feel confident in themselves, you know? In how they present themselves and show up.”
“This whole 10 years is about sisterhood,” she added.
That started when Brown was just a girl, although neither she nor her family knew it then. Born in the Bronx, Brown moved to New Haven as a kid, curious and bubbly in the classroom and a doting sister to two younger brothers at home. By the time she was a fifth grader at Roberto Clemente School, she had started doing her own hair, after her mom handed the responsibility over to her and suggested that it was time to learn.
It was a revelation, although she didn’t recognize it as that at the time. Before school each day, Brown carefully practiced different styles, experimenting with all make and manner of scrunchies, clips, and barrettes. Before long, she found herself doing hair for her cousins and classmates, using platforms like YouTube to figure out what she didn’t know. By the time she was a student at James Hillhouse High School, people knew to go to her for their style needs, whether it was for a show-stopper of a school dance or a personal event.
“You know how you just know how to do something so you don’t look at it as a skill?” she said. “It was another way to connect with people, to connect with women … and I still feel like that now. So it wasn’t like I was 10, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m gonna be a hairdresser when I get older.’ I never thought in a million years that I would become a hairstylist.”
Meanwhile, she excelled in school, with a particular knack for poetry, writing and debate that made her consider becoming an English teacher. When she was 16, she grew those skills—and her love for kids—in a job with Leadership, Education, and Athletics in Partnership (LEAP), after staff there presented their work at a high school job fair.
Brown fell in love with the organization during her time there. For years, she worked as a junior and then senior counselor, rising through the program’s ranks as she nurtured kids in whom she saw her younger self. She worked as a site director, then fielded calls at the front desk. “I was like, ‘How can I stay involved?’” she said with a high, warm laugh that sounded like music.
When Brown headed to Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) for college, she was certain that she was on a path to become an educator. Her love for poetry and writing, which had first emerged in elementary school, had bloomed fully by then. From her time at LEAP, she also knew that she was good with kids, and loved the work.
But while working a student job in a group home, she realized the scale of developmental and educational need that existed in inner-city schools—and started to consider a different career. When she graduated, it was with a job in health care, and a talent for hair that was a flourishing side gig.
But Trachouse—or what became Trachouse—bloomed out of necessity. While Brown was working at Clifford Beers Community Care Center, she launched a small dry bar at 91 Shelton Ave., tucked away in a suite at the New Haven Business Center, to serve people beyond her home. Because she was already holding down a full-time job, she would head there after work and on the weekends.
Life kept unfolding around her: Brown got married and welcomed her daughter, Marley, into the world. She added three part-time employees. She played tetris with her schedule to fit in hair appointments, from wedding stylings to the perfect style for a baby shower, and still be present as a mom. If there was something she didn't know how to do, she learned it on the job.
“All these things were happening,” she said with a laugh—and she rolled with them. Being a small business owner meant (and still means) that she wore many hats, sometimes all at once: she would do someone’s hair for a wedding or baby shower, and then turn around and file taxes, and then make sure the shop was clean and ready to welcome the next client.
So when an employee suggested that she grow her services beyond a dry bar, she found a space at 900 Grand Ave., and opened the doors to the community. Trachouse was expanding its footprint.
Initially, it was just her and three part-time employees, with offerings that grew as the business did. In the 900 Grand Ave. space, Brown welcomed dozens of new clients, who spread the word about Trachouse’s work to their friends, and then friends of their friends, and then friends of friends of friends. For four glorious years, the business thrived. Brown was able to see a dream come to fruition.
And then in March 2020, Covid-19 brought everything to a screeching halt.
“That was really stressful,” she remembered. It was just a week, maybe less, between New Haven’s first known Covid-19 case and an announcement from Gov. Ned Lamont that barbershops, hair salons, tattoo and piercing parlors had to close immediately per state orders. There was no official date on which it would be safe to reopen.
Brown, who knew how thin the margins could be for a small business, somehow kept moving forward. It helped that she had kept a full-time job at Quinnipiac University, she said: she had learned that "entrepreneurship has its ebbs and flows,” and that a steady job could fill the gap in lean times. Her paycheck from Quinnipiac allowed her to pay the salon’s bills—and to dream bigger.
As businesses began to return to a new normal, Trachouse reopened its doors, and expanded to a beauty lounge on State Street, with services that ranged from teeth whitening, nail care and waxing to facials and peels with a trained esthetician. The model worked because Brown, and members of the Trachouse family, had already spent years building trust in greater New Haven. No one was worried that employees weren’t masking properly or following hand-washing protocols, she said.
When she had doubts, Brown added, her faith sustained her.
“I know that in times when there’s a hiccup, or something’s not going quite the way that I planned, that God has a greater plan for what’s supposed to happen,” she said. “That there’s no need to worry or have fear or anxiety, because God didn’t give us those things. He gave us the things that we get, and he gives us the tools to handle that.”
It was perhaps through that generous outlook that Brown—with a staff that is now 16 full- and part-time employees—expanded the salon’s mission into the Trachouse Cares Foundation in 2022. At the time, Brown had already started small-scale projects to give back to the community, including an annual wig fitting and styling for breast cancer patients in honor of her two grandmothers, both breast cancer survivors. The foundation just made it formal.
What had begun as an initiative that could serve one or two cancer patients per year grew into “The Pink Project,” a full day of pampering for multiple members of the community who had survived or were actively diagnosed with and battling breast cancer. As fellow businesses learned about it, they jumped on to help, offering flowers, pastries, and gift bags for the participants.
A few years ago, Trachouse Cares added “Period,” an annual partnership with medical students at Quinnipiac University where girls between 8 and 12 could speak candidly about “their ever-changing bodies,” including and especially their menstrual cycles. “We’re all women and this is gonna happen, so how can you be prepared for that?” Brown said. She stresses health literacy during the session, knowing firsthand that Black women and girls are much more likely to face discrimination when they come to healthcare professionals with a problem.
She and members of Trachouse Cares also do visits in public and private schools, as a way to teach young people about entrepreneurship. The next information session takes place at her alma mater, Hillhouse High School, next month. In the coming year, the foundation will also be launching an apprenticeship program, to give young people learning in the fields that interest them.
As she celebrates the salon’s 10-year anniversary this Sunday, Brown is reveling in the community that she and team members at Trachouse have created—and dreaming about what the next decade may look like. In a decade, she's watched clients get married, have children, move jobs and sometimes move away from Connecticut. Some are just with her for a short chapter of their life, she said. Others stay with her for years, until they are practically family.
“Ten years really goes by like the blink of an eye!” she said. “We’ve had all of these experiences, all of these beautiful moments—and not so beautiful moments—it’s just like, what?! When did all this occur?”