A salon in Prince George’s County now runs every hour of every day, and the woman behind it began her life in America with $50 in her pocket.
Nadine Djuiko, an immigrant from Cameroon, is the founder of Nadine’s Hair Braiding. This business has grown from a small storefront into what is described as the largest hair braiding salon in North America. The operation employs more than 400 stylists on a rotating basis and can seat over 150 clients at once.
Djuiko opened her first salon in 2015 at West Bowie Village, where she saw fewer than ten clients a day. She distributed flyers around the DMV region, at Howard University, Largo and Lanham, hoping to reach Black women who needed braiding services.
Her path to that point had not been straightforward. She once hoped to study banking in the United States but could not afford tuition, so she turned to braiding to support herself. Her first income in America came in Minnesota, where she braided a client’s hair for $35 over roughly ninety minutes. She later moved to Bowie, where she apprenticed under a mentor for several weeks without pay, and at one stage considered quitting to find a job at McDonald’s instead.
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