We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Danielle Hardy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Danielle below.

Danielle , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you take vacations? Why or why not?

My husband and I own 5 businesses that are open 6 days a week. While we don’t need to physically be in each business anymore for them to run efficiently, they require brain power. We absolutely fuel up by traveling and we make sure to do it often. We luckily are at a point in our careers where we’re flexible enough to get away. Not only does it fill us back up and pour into our marriage, but it inspires us seeing how other like-minded businesses run and how we can incorporate that in ours.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Both my husband and I, along with a third business partner (who joined on right before the pandemic hit) run these businesses. The hair studio is our baby who’s turning 10 this year. We opened CUT on my 25th birthday and people thought we were crazy for being so young, but we looked at it from the view of “okay, we’re young enough so if all fails we have time to rebuild and go another direction”. However it took off and is still a huge success in our community.

My husband, Peach, and I started a coffee bar with partners in town years ago, but we’re only a part of that project for the start up. We knew that wasn’t goodbye to the coffee world so we ended up starting a little roastery in our garage back in 2015. This started as a hobby and then again, took off so we needed to make it official with an LLC, a new production space and hiring people. This business is one of our most successful to date.

In 2018 we decided it was time to open another coffee bar, so that’s when HARDYS was birthed. This coffee bar has been an incredible support to CUT as they’re in the same building and literally share a break room with one another. Every client of CUT gets a complimentary drink from HARDYS which is a fun perk and so much better than the traditional keurig most hair studios have.

We’ve since started a little bakery to supply solely for our coffee bar as well as a Holding Company that’s the umbrella for all the other businesses.

Peach & I are very passionate about branding, serving well, and creating the coolest environments that are not only very cutting edge, but also comfortable for our clients and customers.

It’s been such a blessing serving our community at many different capacities. We love it!

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Lucky for me, my husband is my business partner and partner in life. Its been a tough journey of learning work/life balance, but after ten years of working together we finally figured out the dance and how to stay in our lanes.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

We worked really hard to get out of a decent amount of debt before we decided to open our first company, a hair studio in Flemington, NJ called CUT artisan. hair. design. We worked tirelessly – me doing hair and Peach, my husband, doing whatever he could put his hands to. We were only 25 years old when we opened and knew we didn’t want to owe anyone anything so we had to save until we could do things outright with no loans. It didn’t take long, but after we signed our lease we were able to afford everything we needed! Now don’t get me wrong, although our studio is extremely high end, we are scrappy and can make things work that a lot of people don’t have the grit for.. like Peach helping the builders custom make all of our furniture.

Contact Info:

• Website: CUTNJ.com
• Instagram: @cutnj
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/cut-artisan-hair-design-flemington-2?utm_campaign=www_business_share_popup&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=(direct)
• Other: We own another brick and mortar too – a coffee bar called HARDYS Coffee bar. Instagram – @hardyscoffeebar