ARock Your World

SAN ANGELO, TX — The beauty industry in San Angelo, woman-driven, is big business. Back in June, a major player in hair, makeup, and dermal fillers, ARock Saloon, moved around the corner from its former 1500 square foot downtown location on S. Chadbourne St. to 28 Concho Ave. in a remodeled 4800-square-foot facility.

ARock added massage therapy, educational courses for makeup, tanning, and soon will have celebrity makeup and hair artists visit.

Downtown is not without its share of popular women’s salons. Burlap and Paisley, on N. Chadbourne, does a healthy business, too. And then there is Palladian on Knickerbocker Rd. not to mention the multitudes of hair and nail salons in strip centers all over town.

When you get down to it, although she disavows the competitive nature of her business, ARock owner Autumn Brockman’s eyes are focused on her standing on social media versus her competitors, where women dominate the demographics. In San Angelo, over 65 percent of the people who follow the geographically focused San Angelo LIVE! Facebook page are women. ARock’s followers are over 80 percent female.

The leading salons are in a cold war on social media. The casual observer not watching San Angelo’s beauty industry may not take note of Burlap’s 31,782 fans versus ARock’s 33,341 fans on Facebook, and that could flip-flop any given month. To put that into perspective, the City of San Angelo’s hyperactive social media outreach, backed with a multi-six-figure departmental budget, new studios, a half decade of professionally-produced video content, and two dedicated staff only has 27,605 fans.

Why is women’s beauty such big business in San Angelo, and how has ARock managed to grow?

Brockman points again to social media. No lady wants an irrelevant hairstyle or look. Social media attractiveness feeds on likes, comments, and shares, all of which point towards confirmation bias. When more people like your piece of content, which in this case is usually a new hairstyle or beauty treatment, the more value the source of that special look is. Social media is a built-in marketing engine for fashion and makeup.

Brockman sublets spaces inside her ARock location to stylists who she handpicks. She scours Instagram and Facebook for the up-and-coming new stylists.

“That’s your portfolio,” is how Brockman described social media. To the stylists who can fit in with ARock’s edgy persona, they’ll make a good living. Many stylists start out on a commission plan before striking out on their own with rented space.

“We recruit them and then boost them out on social media,” Brockman explained. The more clientele Brockman can bring to her team, the faster ARock grows.

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Above: Hannah Kasik aka HbeautyK, an ARock makeup and hair artist, as promoted on social Media. (ARock Salon Facebook)

A line of makeup supplements the real estate business of subletting space in the salon. The ARock-branded lipstick line is called “liquid lips.” The line is sold all over the world from the ARock website. “It goes on smoothly and is non-transferable,” is how Brockman pitches her product.

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Above: ARock's lipstick. (ARock Facebook)

Brockman’s entry into the salon business wasn’t traditional. She arrived in San Angelo from the small town of Vernon near Wichita Falls to attend Angelo State University. “I wanted to be a nurse practitioner,” Brockman said of her arrival here in the mid-90s. She soon found out that she had talent as a makeup artist. The common denominator between nursing and cosmetology is helping other people.

“Inspire confidence” is the ARock slogan, and Brockman believes everyone has beauty if their personal style can be properly enhanced with styling.

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Above: Before and after photos after hairstyling are among the popular ways to promote salons on social media. (ARock Salon Facebook)

“Your hair and eyebrows are the most important features you can control,” she said. “Most people don’t need much makeup if their hair and eyebrows are taken care of.”

By the late 1990s, Brockman was making a name for herself regionally as a hair and makeup artist. Soon, she was sought in Los Angeles as a model and as a hair and makeup artist.Talent agents booked her for music videos, like the early country rap videos by Mikel Knight. In this one, filmed in 2008, Brockman is the barmaid:

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And she is featured in “Do Da Damn Hamm” by rapper Dat Boi Play here:

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She was featured in magazines like Street Customs, Laid Low, and Performance Auto and Sound. She was hired as a makeup artist for Go Daddy commercials and was featured as a model in major publications such as Maxim, FMH, and Black Men’s Magazine. Throughout the 2000s, Brockman was commuting from west Texas to Los Angeles where she worked as a makeup and hair artist in Hollywood.

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Above: Autumn Brockman centerfold in an automotive magazine call Street Customs.

Brockman said she grew weary of the road and wanted to build something real. She earned her degree in Cosmetology at Odessa College in 2008 while freelancing in LA. By 2013, though, Brockman was ready to plant roots in San Angelo.

San Angelo offered a large enough market to make a name for her but it was small enough to bootstrap her idea of bringing her LA brand, ARock, to west Texas, she explained.

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Above: Autumn Brockman, centerfold in Skinnie Magazine. 

In 2013, she rented space in the Palladian Spa and quickly grew a local clientele until she was able to strike out on her own, with her own storefront, in 2016.

Brockman describes ARock as an edgy salon. “Stay with the times,” she said of her business. “Don’t ever become stagnant. Create eye-catching work while looking for what’s different. Then find a trend and make unique variations.”

To be competitive, Brockman admits she takes risks. “You have to take risks to be more edgy than they (the competition) are,” she said.

At the same time, concerning the competition, she tells herself and her artists, “Don’t worry about what everyone is specifically doing, though. Focus on you. You need to worry about yourself and building your own empire.”