Almost half of America's hair stylists
already work for themselves.
They book their own clients, set their own prices, and keep their own money. What most of them do not have is a nice place to work. That is the business you would be buying.
There are about 651,200 beauty professionals in America, and roughly half of them already work for themselves. The government expects the trade to keep growing faster than the average American job. The pool you would be recruiting from is large, and it is still getting larger.
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Barbers, Hairstylists and Cosmetologists. 2024 figures, projections to 2034.
Stylists are going independent on their own.
You do not have to talk anyone into it.
Working for yourself is normal in this industry. Among barbers it is already 3 out of 4. The government tracks this, and here is what it found.
How many in each job work for themselves
United States, 2024Working for yourself is already normal in this industry. 3 out of 4 barbers do it. Nearly half of all hairstylists do it. You would not be persuading anyone to take a risky new step. You would be offering a better room to people who already took that step.
Source. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook – barbers, hairstylists and cosmetologists, manicurists, skincare specialists. 2024 figures.
Government job counts leave out
most independent stylists.
There are two different government counts, and they measure two different things. If you only look at the first one, you will badly undercount your market.
Count one: jobs
This counts people who get a paycheck from a salon owner. If a stylist rents her own chair, she is not in this number.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says so itself: “Does OEWS have occupational employment estimates that include the self-employed? No.” – bls.gov/oes/oes_ques.htm
Count two: businesses
This counts one-person businesses with no employees. That is exactly what a stylist renting her own chair files as at tax time.
This second group is who a bex+Co. location signs up as members. It is the group the headline jobs number misses. We count it separately for every market. See page 06.
Boston has 7,870 hairstylists on a payroll.
It has 7,316 one-person salon businesses.
Same city, same year. The second number is almost as big as the first, and it is the one that matters to you.
If you look up "how many hairstylists are in Boston" you will get 7,870, and you will stop there. That figure only counts people receiving a paycheck from a salon owner. The number of beauty pros running their own one-person business in this metro is 7,316, and it grew 4.9% in a year. Most people evaluating this market are looking at the first number and missing an entire second market of the same size.
Sources. Payroll figure: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025, Boston-Cambridge-Newton MA-NH metro area, occupation code 39-5012. Business figure: US Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics 2023, industry code 812112, same metro area, up from 6,976 in 2022. These come from two different surveys and should never be added together.
Stylists want to work for themselves.
Most of them do not want to do it alone.
That gap is what a bex+Co. salon is built for. The founder puts it plainly: “They want to be independent and they want freedom, but they don’t wanna be alone.”
The demand is settled. A competitor has already signed 20,000 stylists and the category has more than doubled in 10 years. Where bex+Co. differs is what the space feels like. Most companies in this category rent a stylist a private suite, which is a locked room she works in by herself. A bex+Co. salon gives her the same independence with other stylists around her, which is the thing their own members say they stayed for.
Sources. The 20,000+ figure is Sola Salon Studios’ own published number – solasalonstudios.com, retrieved 18 August 2026. The +150% figure comes from a bex+Co. industry research pack compiled in June 2026, drawing on IBISWorld and Sola published figures, and is credited to a group of sources rather than one, so we have flagged it as second-hand. The founder quote is from the bex+Co. Discovery Day session of 19 March 2026, lightly cleaned from the recording. The locked-room comparison is bex+Co.’s own framing of the difference, from its stylist content brief.
There are hundreds of thousands of independent stylists.
There are very few good rooms for them to work in.
Closing that gap is the whole business. The next three pages explain how a bex+Co. location does it, and what we already know about the specific market you are looking at.
About the numbers on this page. Figures credited to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Census Bureau are taken directly from those agencies' published files, and the links go to the source. Figures marked second-hand come from a bex+Co. industry research pack compiled in June 2026 that credits its sources as a group rather than one by one. Those are shown as background context and we have not independently checked them.
This page makes no promise about money. Nothing here states or suggests the sales, costs, income, or profit of a bex+Co. franchise. That kind of information would only ever be provided in Item 19 of a Franchise Disclosure Document.