“I had a client who came to me every two weeks for three years,” says Robbie Jacobs, master stylist at Juut in Edina. “She had really short hair that was only a half-inch to inch long.”
Every week the client came in, she told Jacobs she was unhappy with the cut.
“She kept saying it wasn’t working for her, and that we had to get it right,” Jacobs remembers. “She was very particular, and I could tell she had been to every hairdresser in town by the time she saw me.”
Frustrated, Jacobs tried texturizing and any other technique he thought would yield the results the client wanted. But ultimately, he relied on the advice his mom always gave him—live by the Golden Rule.
“So I asked myself, ‘How can I fix this? How can I give her the best hair ever?’”
Before he knew it, Jacobs had developed a strong friendship with his client, who was a single mom putting her son through college.
“She was working two jobs, and I started to realize the energy she was bringing to the salon chair wasn’t about her hair at all,” he says. “She had a tough life, and I had moment of realizing that I can’t give up on people.”
Throughout the three years Jacobs saw the client, they developed a wonderful friendship, and he got to know her family well. But tragedy struck when she got cancer.
“I did a sanctuary haircut on her, and she ended up passing away,” he says. “If I had given up on her in the beginning, I wouldn’t have gotten to know a really beautiful person.”
Jacobs says that client was a learning moment and a Daymaking moment for him that he’ll never forget.
“You have to be a Daymaker to everyone and understand someone’s frustrations may not be about hair at all.
“It has been two years since she passed away and I think about her all the time. If I had given up on her, I never would’ve known her or her family, who I still keep in touch with,” he says.
In fact, when her son comes home from college for holidays, Jacobs cuts his hair and catches up with him.
“When I came to Minneapolis from Fargo, where I’m from, at age 18, everything was new,” he says. “When I found Juut, it was amazing to me to find like-minded people who care.”
But before Juut, he was just a scared teenager. So he created his own personal mission statement he wrote on his bathroom mirror and repeated daily.
“When I was at the Aveda Institute, I would call my mom when I was scared and she would tell me I was going to wake up tomorrow, put myself together – it would be a new day,” he says. “So my mission was: ‘Actively pursuing positivity in a genuine way.’”
Now, Jacobs gives similar advice to new stylists. “I tell them not to give up because we’ve all been there,” he says. “Juut is like a family. We’re all here to help each other out and lift each other up. The bumps in the road lead up to a really pretty picture.”