Willie & Coote hair salon, courtesy of Google Maps screenshot.
Willie & Coote Salon at the corner of Belmont Avenue and Abrams Road is celebrating 20 years of service.
Fate struck one day when Karen Dittmar was driving around and saw a for-rent sign being taped on the building that became Lakewood’s Willie & Coote. Dittmar originated this salon in Deep Ellum previously but wanted to move for multiple reasons. Limited parking and prevalent homelessness was hard on her guests, and she wanted to expand into a bigger space.
Dittmar parked her car and went up to the owner taping the sign to inquire about the price. When she heard the answer, she followed up with another question: “Would you take cash?”
The owner let her lease the space but was convinced that a hair salon wouldn’t last. Dittmar said Sides Heating and Air Conditioning had previously occupied that location for decades. The lease started in September, and Willie & Coote opened on Nov. 5, 2005.
“My friends and I went in there and completely built it out ourselves,” Dittmar said of the renovation process.
The salon is named after Dittmar’s mother, Willie, and Aunt Coote, the latter of whom was a hairdresser for 45 years in San Angelo.
“I had spent every summer sweeping hair for her,” she said.
Dittmar, who works on her clients’ hair alongside her staff, has employees that have stayed on for 16 years and clients that have kept coming back for 20 years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she continued to pay her staff’s salaries and for their health insurance, thanks to a Paycheck Protection Program Loan. She has strived to open “a salon that I’d want to work at.”
“That means just a salon that takes care of its employees, and a salon that cares and gives everyone a certain amount of autonomy to be creative and to think for themselves and to make good decisions and give them education and give them a support system,” she said. “So hopefully, we have created that.”
This is part of what Dittmar attributes to Willie & Coote’s success. Maintaining a talented and capable staff as well as prioritizing customer satisfaction also helps keep the doors open.
“We have clients that would feel comfortable sitting in any chair in there that have come to us for 20 years, and every time there’s a new person, they’re perfectly happy going to see the new person because they know that we’ve trained them and that we back up all of our employees with a certain amount of education, and we feel like everyone is at a level that you should feel safe in any chair in there,” Dittmar said. “We stand behind what we do.”
Dittmar aims for the vibe in Willie & Coote to be nice and comfortable, not pretentious — “a friendly neighborhood salon that provides an amazing service and amazing customer service with really talented staff that knows what they’re doing.”
Some of those qualities are also what Dittmar likes about Lakewood, which she said is “full of kind, generous people who treat each other with respect.”
“Even though there’s gentrification and that the houses are changing, and some of the smaller, older homes have been torn down, and new ones have been put up — Lakewood has continued to be a friendly neighborhood and a neighborhood that has a lot of kindness (which is hard to find sometimes in Dallas) and just an openness and kindness in the neighborhood that creates a comfortable place for people to be,” she said. “It’s like being in a small town in a big city.”
Willie & Coote also supports the local community by donating prizes, auction items and services.
“We always do any kind of donation for any kind of event or any of the service organizations,” Dittmar said. “And we also do for all the schools, all the events and all the donations for every auction because we have all the moms. We do hair for the benefits. We do hair for proms for the displaced youth. We do Wigs For Kids, and so we will donate the haircut if they want to donate the hair.”
You may think this kind of voluntary community service isn’t necessary, more of an extracurricular, but that is not the way Dittmar sees it.
“These are our guests that we see every time,” she said. “They’re loyal to us; we need to be loyal to them.”
Dittmar’s goal for the future is to do even more for clients and improve their experience by offering scalp massages, hand massages, discounts for referrals and birthdays, and an expanded beverage selection.
“There are a lot of salons to choose from,” she said. “We have to give people a reason to keep coming back to us. We have to just keep improving the experience and making sure that they know that we’re there for them, 100%.”
In honor of the 20th anniversary, there will be an event at Willie & Coote from 4:30-7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 5 that will include blowout specials, holiday gift package discounts, giveaways, surprises, refreshments and a special on Botox. You will need a reservation to get Botox.
