Owner Dena Buroczi stands inside De Miglia Salon, located at 2400 Whitehorse-Mercerville Road. (Staff photo by Kait Kelly.)
Dena Buroczi–owner of De Miglia Salon–describes her business as family-oriented in more than just one respect.
First, she said most of her client base is made up of families; moms and dads with their kids all coming in to get their haircut. Buroczi also said she loves people, and she treats each client as if they were a member of her own family.
For example, Buroczi said she always puts her clients’ needs first.
“I’ll never overprocess someone’s hair,” she said. “If they want highlights sooner than I think they need it, I always urge them against it. I’ll do it if they really want me to, but it’s going to get dry. I’m honest with them. I could make the money, but I tend to value our relationship more.”
Another aspect of Buroczi’s family-oriented business is the family legacy behind it.
“I’ve owned this business for 2 ½ years,” Buroczi said. “Before that, it was my father’s business. It’s really three generations. His father had a business, then my father and now I took it over.”
Even though Buroczi’s dad, Victor Migliarese, passed on the business to her, he still stays very active in the salon. Buroczi said the chemistry in their father-daughter duo is something that has helped set them apart.
“With some of my father’s clients, he just cuts their hair, and I do the chemical work,” she said. “We’ve got the timing down so that when I’m done, his last customer is walking out, while the one I just finished is walking in for their cut. We really just have a unique way of doing it. I mean, we’ve been doing this together for about 25 years now. After that long, I guess you get a system down.”
This system is important to De Miglia Salon because they do not believe in letting the customers wait.
“If your appointment is at 2 o’clock, we are ready for you at 2 o’clock,” Buroczi said. “If for any reason we are running behind, we give you a phone call. We would never, ever let somebody sit here and wait. We know people are busy. They have kids, they have jobs, they have activities, and no one has time to just sit here.”
Another thing that sets De Miglia Salon apart is the way their salon is set up. Instead of approaching a place right off of the street with huge windows exposing the client’s inside with foil tangled in their hair, De Miglia Salon is located in an office building. Inside its “office,” it has private rooms.
“My father runs a non-profit organization called the ‘Helping Hand Fund’ for anyone dealing with medically-related hair loss, and they can come in and get free wigs,” Buroszi said. “When someone comes in and they need their head shaved because they’re going through chemo, they don’t want to be in the middle of a salon. Someone who does hair replacement doesn’t want to be sitting here with people looking at them. Some men get their hair colored or they get perms, and they don’t want women to see them with rods or color in their hair. This makes it nice and private for those patients.”
Buroczi said the Helping Hand Fund has become a very important part of her business, and she owes a lot of her and her salon’s success to her father.
“He truly is passionate about this business,” Buroczi said. “He loves people, and that’s what brought him to starting the Helping Hand Fund. He’s just a good person. He’s the one who’s established so much of the business before I even came along. He must be doing something right to keep these people coming for over 30 years. He says they keep coming back for his funny jokes.”
Buroczi believes there are a lot of factors that make her salon different: the personality and family-oriented feel, their respect for their customer’s time and refusal to make a customer wait and the setup of the salon offering clients privacy. Most of all, however, Buroczi believes what really makes her salon different is her father, their vibe together and their combined love for the industry.
“This business has been great to me,” Buroczi said. “I’ve met a lot of great people. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
De Miglia Salon is located on the second floor of the Tower Plaza Building at 2400 Whitehorse-Mercerville Road in Hamilton. For more information, call: (609) 587-3808, website: demiglia.com. For more information of the Helping Hand Fund, visit helpinghandfund.org.
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