Shelley Martin has always had a thing for dealing in lines and angles and distance.
This affinity has led her into a couple of very different careers. On one hand she is a beautician and a wig stylist. On the other she is a potter.
“I bought my first wig salon in 2004 and prior to that I did hair for 40 years,” she says.
When she was 18, Shelley was a young Navy wife living in the Norfolk, Va. area with two small children. Sixteen years ago, children grown, she moved to Fort Myers.
“I was supposed to be retiring,” she laughs. “I didn’t want to go back behind the chair and do hair anymore.”
Then she saw a newspaper ad that said: “Net $35,000 a year, work three days a week.” Shelley called the number and was informed that the business was a wig shop in a busy flea market.
“My husband and I sat outside the shop. This was in March. It was fascinating to watch,” she says. “They couldn’t keep the stuff in the store. I said, ‘This is my store.’”
A decade later, Shelley had quadrupled store sales and sold the business.
“I was ready to re-retire,” she says.
Her foray into hair styling began as a preteen when her grandmother, who lived on the same street in Miami, asked Shelley to cut her hair.
“I didn’t really know what I was doing and it always turned out OK,” she recalls.
Then her grandmother started telling her friends about the granddaughter who did her hair.
“I charged $2 for a shampoo and set,” she says.
As a youngster when they first moved to Florida from Baltimore, cash was always in short supply in her household. Her father held down three jobs – sheet metal worker for an airline, tire salesman and nights at a drive-in movie. Her mother worked split shifts at Southern Bell.
“So, in the evening when my mother was gone, Dad would fill a big old box of popcorn and leave us in the car watching the movie while he worked,” she says.
Shelley also had a window-washing business but her mother would not permit her inside other people’s homes.
“She’d only let me do the outside of the houses. I thought this was very limiting,” she says. “And it was hard work schlepping around the ladder. So, I thought, ‘What do people need that they don’t like to do?’”
It was also in an era when many people smoked in their cars. So, Shelley figured out that washing their car windows was her answer. She passed out handmade fliers and soon had a thriving neighborhood business.
In 2013, Shelley and her husband, Michael, bought their home in the Village of Amelia – and some of the wig-styling clients followed her.
“I have a customer in Orlando who wants to talk about colors, but you can’t convey color over the phone or even over the computer,” she says. “You have to see it in person.”
She keeps about 75 wigs of different styles and colors in her inventory. All are made from life-like synthetic material. Styling includes her own steaming techniques and very judicious trimming if necessary.
“I trim very little. It’s not going to grow in again if I cut too much,” she laughs.
In her experience, only about a third of people – mostly women – who wear wigs do so because of illness or other conditions.
“I have a lot of clients who have perfectly good hair,” says Shelley, who has been wearing wigs for years. “They wear wigs because they want a different style, to blend in with an outfit or just for fun.”
Shelley started her pottery avocation even before becoming a beautician.
“I remember as a kid making mud salads,” she says. “I would take a pie pan from the kitchen and sit outside mixing leaves and mud.”
Arriving in The Villages, she found that she needed more than her love of mud to be accepted in a pottery class. She had completed only a couple of entry level classes when her father became ill and she went back to South Florida to help her mother.
“So, I missed most of the classes,” she says.
But when she returned to The Villages, an instructor at Rohan Recreation Center took a chance on her.
“I told him what I knew, which wasn’t much, but that I was a fast learner,” she says.
Within a year, she had moved from “something fairly primitive” to working with slump molds. She became so engrossed in pottery that Michael and their friends turned her golf cart garage into an insulated, air-conditioned, cozy pottery studio.
“I was told a lot of things by the instructors. But I had to find out on my own,” she says. “So, there was plenty of trepidation at first. When I tried things and they worked, I started trying all kinds of other things.”
Now she has her own methodology and techniques for many of her distinctive pottery items. Surrounded by big blocks of clay and jars of glazes on shelves, Shelley spends part of her time teaching pottery novices the basics of handling the clay – the same training that she had to skip. Her teaching is hands-on.
“I actually have the students make the item because it’s much easier to help them learn by creating it step-by-step,” she says. “I help them score, use slip and put the item together so that it will stay, withstand the bisque firing, glazing and final firing.”
Family challenges are all in a day’s work. For instance, she said her daughter-in-law recently told her that she wanted to make an owl bowl like one she had seen on the social media website Pinterest.
“Obviously, she didn’t want to start at the beginning,” was Shelley’s first thought. After several hours of work and plenty of hands-on instruction, the owl bowl was emerging.
“I thought she did well for her first attempt,” Shelley noted with a proud smile. “I was very impressed.”
John W Prince is a writer and Villager. For more information visit www.GoMyStory.com. If you know of someone with a good Story, contact John at John@GoMyStory.com.
