New Union Avenue salon opens – with a twist

LACONIA — It can take up to four hours for Diaka Conde to give a client a braid, but when she’s done she looks into the client’s eyes, not on their head, to see if she did her job.

“This has been a passion for me," Conde said in an interview at her shop on Monday. "I like to do it. I like to make people feel beautiful.”

Conde has been braiding hair for 20 years but recently went into business for herself. She opened Belle Braiding Salon, located at 687 Union Ave., on Aug. 15, providing a service that she said isn’t offered north of Manchester.

Conde is a native of Guinea and said she’s been braiding hair since she was a girl.

“I started with my sisters in Africa when I was 11 or 12 years old,” Conde said. When she got older, she moved to a city and started working in a salon as a cosmetologist.

For the past five years, she’s been living in Laconia, after marrying a man who is also from Guinea but had immigrated to the United States many years earlier. She likes Laconia’s friendly people and quiet life, though there were some difficulties with the move. Winter took some time to get used to, she said, and, “I was having trouble doing my hair. I had to go to Manchester or Boston to do my hair. I noticed there was no braiding salon in the area at all. I thought, Laconia needs something like this.”

Her clients agreed. Once word got out that Conde could braid, she started getting calls from people who didn’t want to make the drive to an established braiding salon. And once they saw her work, she said, they started pressing her to open her own shop.

Conde braids the way she learned in Guinea. She can do box braids, cornrows, micro braids and dreadlocks, weaving extensions in with the client’s hair for added color or length. She that her clients in the United States have told her that her braids lasted longer and held the extensions better than the braids they could get in other salons, and they urged her to open her own.

“I thought, I can make myself useful to Laconia people so they don’t have to go so far to do their hair,” Conde said.

Conde said she wanted to open her shop in Laconia to honor the support of her loyal customers. In the weeks since she’s opened, she’s had several new customers come in as well, some of whom said they drove for more than an hour to get to her shop.

It’s an unusual decision to open a business in the middle of a pandemic, but Conde said it made sense. Her list of clients was growing, and she was either braiding people in her own home or going to her clients’ homes to do her work. It seemed a safer option for her to open a space dedicated to braiding where she could have control over the cleanliness of her workspace.

Though her braiding style is African, she said she can apply her techniques universally. “I have white clients, black clients, Korean, everybody,” Conde said. “I do all kinds of hair.”

Due to the coronavirus, Conde is currently working by appointment only, to avoid crowding and so that she can clean before and after each appointment. She is only offering braiding for the time being, though she said she would open her shop to other aestheticians or hair dressers, even tattoo artists.

“Anyone who wants to work with me, they are more than welcome,” she said. “Anyone who can make someone feel beautiful, I’m willing to work with them.”

Conde said that she has felt welcomed by her new community, and that feeling was underscored when she opened her business and people who lived nearby stopped in to wish her well and offer their help. “It touches my heart,” she said.

“I want to thank all my clients, and Laconia people. Since I’ve been here, I want to thank them for their support and the encouragements. My loyal clients, they are part of the reason that encourage me to open the shop,” Conde said.