On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene destroyed Wink Salon's flagship 22-chair location in Biltmore Village, Asheville, North Carolina — and with it more than 70% of the business. Overnight, the salon went from 30 chairs across two locations to just eight. In October 2026, a full two years after the storm, the flagship will reopen with a deliberately smaller footprint and a redesigned commission structure.

Co-owners Christine DiBenedetto and Gilda Santiago had spent 20 years building an employee-based salon business anchored in education, career development and entrepreneurship. When the storm hit, neither owner could even see the damage at first. "We had no cell service, no internet, no television, and Gilda and I were having two completely different experiences of the same disaster," DiBenedetto recalls. Santiago reached Biltmore Village first. "I will never forget her walking down my street crying and saying, 'It's gone. It's gone.'"

The immediate response was triage, not a plan. The owners left the area just to regain connectivity, checked on the safety of their team, and shut down automatic expenses still being drafted from accounts. They began navigating FEMA and the Small Business Administration while, as DiBenedetto puts it, "two business owners in shock" tried to "stop the financial bleeding."

What kept Wink alive, she says, was financial discipline built over two decades. From the earliest days, she put money away — even when it was only $50 a week. As the business grew, she tracked cash flow closely, knowing exactly what was coming in, going out and where the salon was vulnerable. Those reserves, built for smaller shocks like losing a top producer or an unexpected slowdown, were never designed to absorb the loss of an entire flagship location. They were not enough for that. But they bought time.

"Our reserves weren't enough to absorb something this big, but they gave us some breathing room," DiBenedetto says. "We didn't have to make every financial decision from a place of panic."

The two years away from Biltmore Village forced a strategic reset. Rather than restore the 22-chair model, the owners asked what they would keep, change or discard if they were designing Wink from scratch with 20 years of hindsight. They let go of a portion of the salon space, restructured commission and compensation, cut unnecessary expense, and examined whether their systems were supporting stylists or creating barriers — with particular attention to what younger stylists need to build sustainable careers and whether the pay structure is competitive for recruitment and retention.

"We aren't starting over. We're starting again with 20 years of information," DiBenedetto says.

The human cost was severe. Many younger team members and support staff lived paycheck to paycheck, some with major damage to their homes. The eight-chair second location could not absorb the full team. People left Asheville, left the industry, or were too traumatized to work; others called and said, "I'm ready. What can I do?" Jobs were cut. DiBenedetto acknowledges the anger and disappointment, and stands by the decisions: "if Wink was going to survive, we had to make them."

Her central lesson for owners is blunt: take the business part of the business seriously. Salon ownership attracts people who love the craft, not necessarily business management, but she argues owners need to spend at least as much time building business acumen as building a social media presence. "Cash gives you time to think. Leadership allows you to act when none of the available choices feel good," she says, adding that she wants to see more owners build businesses they can sustain — and eventually leave with a big retirement party.

Santiago knew from the beginning she wanted to rebuild; DiBenedetto needed nearly a year to fall back in love with the business. Returning to Biltmore Village, she says, feels like finishing the chapter the way they always wanted — with hope, a strong team and a leaner, more intentional model for the next ten or twenty years.