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“A side hustle is a great thing to have. When life circumstances change, having a skill you can be paid for helps in many ways.”
Tamekia Swint's interest in hair braiding started early. Her mom braided her hair every week, and by the time Tamekia could hold a comb she was pestering to learn. By her early teens she'd mastered cornrows and Dutch braids. When she went to college, she turned the skill into extra income: after completing a styling course, she printed flyers listing her services and prices and handed them out on the campus quad, charging $35 for a minimum two-hour sitting and $15 for each additional hour.
She built a solid client base through referrals and earned a few hundred dollars a week around her studies. After graduation she took a job as a parole agent and set braiding aside — but a few years later, with loans to pay and the appeal of a second income, she picked it back up, booking friends and using their heads as walking billboards to attract more clients.
Over the years she paused and returned several times — through business school, marriage, working for her husband's business, divorce, and a job at an insurance firm — running braiding as a side hustle 10 to 20 hours a week and eventually earning up to $4,000 a month. She didn't need high volume, since a single client's hair can take between two and ten hours.
Everything changed after a church mission trip to Poland, where she taught kids to braid their own hair as a way to get them talking and learning English. She loved teaching, and the kids responded. Back home, she wanted to work more with children, so she expanded her services to include kids' hair, promoting it with the same flyers and business cards she'd always used.
One family she grew close to was a trans-racial adoptive family — white parents who'd adopted two African-American daughters and didn't know how to care for their hair, and neither did the girls. Tamekia jumped in, styling the daughters' hair and teaching their mom the basics. Soon other trans-racial adoptive families were reaching out for the same help.
That led Tamekia to start a nonprofit, Styles 4 Kidz, which styles African-American children's hair and teaches adoptive families how to manage it. Much like her side hustle, she built it purely on referrals, only recently adding social media. One recent year she and her volunteers served 500 children in and around Chicago, with 1,000 projected the next — an unexpected twist that turned a side income into a mission.
