This year, two rooms in District House are buzzing from the whirs of electric razors and the snips of scissors. 

Floors above hungry students ordering Halal Shack bowls and drinks from Peet’s Coffee, others are receiving cheap, professional-grade haircuts from two student entrepreneurs who have launched barbershops out of their District House rooms. The student barbers said they have used past experiences working in professional barbershops and offering haircuts to friends and family to their services at GW — trims, lineups and fades, all from the comfort of their District rooms. 

Sophomore Sulaiman Bangura, an entrepreneurship and innovation major and a D.C. native, has been working in barber shops since he was 13. He said that summer he was tired of depending on his parents for spending money, so he got a job at a barbershop down the street from his house in Northeast D.C., where he would go “every day” and receive tips for sweeping hair, selling water and brushing people off when they left the chair.

“It was a fun experience,” Bangura said. “I learned a lot from it.” 

Bangura said he didn’t enter GW last fall with the intention of offering haircuts out of his room, but by last September, he decided on a whim to invest in new clippers and styling tools to set up shop from his Guthridge Hall room. The venture soon turned into a profitable business as he promoted his shop “Sulaycutz” on social media.

“Coming into college, my mindset was, ‘I’m going to find a study that’s going to propel me into creating my own barber business,’” he said. “But I didn’t come here, starting off thinking, ‘Oh, I’m gonna start off doing it,’ but the idea came to me.”

He said he was barbering about 10 clients per week at the business’s peak last year. Bangura said the demand pushed him to change the way he set up appointments, shifting scheduling from text to the digital scheduling platform Calendly. Bangura currently offers haircuts on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoons, according to his Calendly page.

“Once I got a Calendly, it just took off,” he said. “I was just getting clients, clients, clients, and anybody could book times.” 

In his second year at GW, his shop is based out of his new room in District House and covered with the tools of his trade — clippers, brushes, razors and a red, white and blue-striped spinning barber’s pole. He keeps the room pristine, with not a lock of hair on the ground, but the environment in his shop is far from sterile as he jokes with clients about classes and the surprising difficulty of being a math major.

Bangura said he charges $20 per haircut, a $5 increase from last year, and $10 for line-ups — a cut that defines the hairline — making him more affordable for college students than many of the barber shops around D.C. The prices are lower than other local spots like Henry Barbershop, where a student cut is $28.

Bangura said he has garnered about eight regular clients since starting up his in-dorm shop last fall. To attract more clients, he said his regulars often refer him to their friends, and he markets his services by posting photos and videos of his clients’ haircuts on Instagram and Snapchat accounts for his business. 

“I just do marketing, social media marketing and word of mouth,” he said. “A lot of my already clients, they recommended others to me, and so that’s how I get a lot of customers as well. But most of the customers I have now came from the social media presence that I have.”

Just one floor below Bangura’s business, in a different room inside District House, Nicholas Matias has also transformed his dwelling into an at-home barber shop. Matias, a junior majoring in communication and business, said he has been an at-home barber since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when he was living at home in Chicago. 

“During the quarantine, I had a brother who needed a haircut,” Matias said. “I decided to take the clippers in the house and cut his hair. I felt like, after I did that, I could see myself doing this in my future, so I decided to buy myself a pair of clippers.” 

Matias said as his hobby grew through high school, with his friends flocking to his house for haircuts. The more hair he cut, the more skilled he became, and he eventually began to offer his services at a local barber shop. He said the experience taught him how to respond to people’s hair requests and keep up with the common banter between barber and their clients.

“Working at a barber shop in high school was a very unique experience, because I was cutting 30 to 40-year-olds when I was a 16-year-old kid,” Matias said. “That helped me not only with barbering, but communication-wise, I learned a lot.” 

Matias started offering in-house haircuts his first year at GW in Thurston Hall. He said referrals from his 10 regular clients helped his business take off, and he advertises his cuts on his Instagram “nicknextup.” 

Matias’s shop is an instantly cheery environment, as the student barber bops to hip-hop and clicking scissors. A Chicago flag hangs above his workspace as he focuses while using an electric razor inches above his client’s spotty blue smock.

He said his clientele is all men, but he’s confident he could cut “any texture” of hair, long or short. His current rate is $25 per haircut and $30 with a beard trim — lower prices than his now-competitor the Foggy Bottom Barber Shop, located near the Watergate complex, where he worked as a sophomore. He said there the shop charged $40 for a haircut and $50 when combined with the beard trim.

Matias said word spread of his mastery of the fade, a tapered style with short sides and a fuller top, which caused his business to grow.

“One person gets a haircut and their friend’s like, ‘Oh, who cut your hair?’ and he’s like, ‘Nick!’ and then he gives them my number,” he said. “I’ll have random people texting me, ‘Yo, I heard you give good haircuts, can you get me this week?’”

Among Matias’ group of loyal customers is Jake Introzzi, a junior majoring in finance and a patron of Matias’ makeshift barber shop since November 2022.  After receiving an unfavorable haircut elsewhere, a friend recommended Introzzi check out Matias’ shop instead.

Introzzi said he and Matias have become friends outside of the barber’s chair, with Matias’ sense of humor and “great conversation” transforming a typically mundane activity to a bonding experience.

“I think it just makes your experience more enjoyable, having other students cut your hair,” he said. “Someone you can share experiences with, talk about and just relate to a little more than in a typical barber shop.”