Fashion designer-turned-hairdresser now runs three companies

When Rachel Last graduated from college in North Carolina, she took a job as a designer at Wrangler.

It was a decent job, she says, but eventually she moved on, taking a position in merchandising for the retail chain Anthropologie and relocating to Boston.

Photo by Mark Wemple

Last was in her early twenties then and the career track she was on appeared to be solid.

But here’s the thing: She wasn’t happy.

“When I was working in fashion,” she says, “I always gravitated toward hair.”

That was not a new thing. Last grew up wanting to be in the beauty industry, styling hair, but her mother told her it was important that she go to college. And hair is a trade, she says.

The conventional path was the one she took. But after graduating from the fashion program at UNC Greensboro and the two jobs, Last found herself “feeling uninspired.”

“I really just wanted to do hair,” she says.

This time, that’s what she did.

It was a good decision.

Living in Sarasota now, Last owns the holistic Soultuary Salon with friend and mentor Leesha Jaffe, as well as Sarasota Balayage and Long Hair Forever, a hair extension brand. (Balayage is a type of specialized hair coloring technique Last learned in Boston.)

The salon opened not long after Last, who moved to the Sarasota area in 2019, underwent a pair of upheavals in her personal life.

One, her husband died in April 2020. This was the height of the pandemic, when salons were closed. The pandemic was the next upheaval.

She went home to North Carolina for a couple months, both to heal and to quarantine.

Around May, Jaffe, a hairdresser in the business about 10 years longer than Last, called from Sarasota. She had just returned following a difficult divorce and was rebuilding her business.

The apartment next to the one she’d just rented was vacant.

Last remembers Jaffe telling her, “Why don't you move in next door to me, and we'll figure it out.”

There were no other salons open in the country at the time and she felt as if there weren’t too many options. “I came back,” Last says.

“We really shared a lot of the same ethos, so we decided to put our money together and open a salon of our own. Soultuary.

“It was our healing, like journey through the pandemic and all of that. Just us healing with each other during that season that was so hard.”