It’s always nice to treat yourself from time to time, whether that be going out to eat at your favorite restaurant or getting yourself glammed up.
Especially in college, times can get hard in terms of workload and stress, and treating yourself is just one way to feel better. Tynecia Wilson fully understands this and is willing to work with students to make them look and feel great at affordable prices.
Tynecia Wilson is the founder of “SlayybyTayy,” where she does hairstyling for students on campus and around Philadelphia.
Tynecia, also known as Tay Wilson, is a sophomore double majoring in Kinesiology and Spanish. She is also a member of BAMN, a dance company on campus. Wilson is from West Philadelphia and first got into doing hair the summer before her junior year of high school. After having a bad experience with getting her hair done by someone else, she decided she wasn’t going to let anyone do her hair anymore and instead do it herself. This was all a learning process for Wilson at first.
“I started doing my own hair. That was a lot of trial and error. After a while, I started doing my sisters’ hair then moved onto their friends’ hair and thought, ‘You know what, I’m kind of good at this,’” she said.
After a lot of practice on others and watching tutorials on Youtube, Wilson was starting to become satisfied with her results. She decided to start up ‘SlayybyTayy” for people, especially students on campus to get their hair done. She never would have predicted how often she would be doing hair now, and although she commutes to campus, she is able to be contacted very easily.
“I come down here, people come to me, everything works out. I just decided I might as well make this a thing. Instead of just saying, ‘I do hair,’ I wanted to turn that into ‘SlayybyTayy,’ and make an Instagram and Facebook page for it,” she said.
“SlayybyTayy” specializes primarily in braiding. She has a lot of other hair services that will be coming soon in the future, and does hair for both men and women. For clients who come to her to get their hair done, she has a location in West Philadelphia close to where she lives, and for students on campus, she’ll come to their dorm or wherever they live.
Social media plays a large role in promoting her brand.
Wilson can be seen promoting her brand on various social media pages. Recently, she just incorporated models for her brand to give clients a visual of the styling she does. When Wilson first started doing hair for others, she would post pictures on Instagram but felt like they weren’t really going anywhere.
“I had 20 followers at the time. I kind of just left the account alone. When I saw that I was getting better, I decided to go back to my Instagram and started to promote the brand a lot more,” she said.
When Wilson saw more growth in her following, she decided to create her own logo and came up with the name “SlayybyTayy” to add more individuality to her brand. Her following has quickly expanded from 20 followers to 200 ever since she made more adjustments, and she is continuing to gain more day by day.
Since its beginning, “SlayybyTayy” has grown immensely. In terms of where Wilson sees “SlayybyTayy” in the future, she believes the future of her brand is still unknown.
“I don’t really know. I feel like right now it is just for services I could provide to others and make money from. It might just be something that stays on the side, but then again, back in 2016 I didn’t even pay attention to my Instagram page and now I’m doing shoots, have a logo, and all that so who knows,” she said.
Wilson’s passion really shows in her work with her clients. She finds that the feeling she gets from doing a client’s hair never gets old.
“It’s the best. Sometimes when I’m doing someone’s hair, I’m just like, ‘Wow, these came out really nice,’” she said.
Wilson doesn’t look at too many others for inspiration, but one person she mentioned that she follows on Instagram is @cliffvmir, a 20 year old celebrity stylist who has over 600 thousand followers on Instagram.
“He’s a celebrity stylist. He’s twenty now and we’re almost the same age and he is just so good. I’m just like, ‘Can I be like you?’ I’m 19 now so I have some time,” she laughed.
“SlayybyTayy” is still new, yet it is growing really quickly and flourishing in terms of advancements to the brand. Wilson is putting in a lot of hard work and is committed to doing her best to satisfy everyone that she works with to give them a great experience. To contact Wilson for hair styling, check out her instagram page, @slayybyytayy, to view her beautiful work and to get your hair slayed!