Lorton Business Profile: Escape Nails & Day Spa: An Oasis in the Strip Mall

The owner of in Lorton doesn’t want local residents to spend their money being pampered in Washington, D.C., or Tysons Corner. Since he took over the spa last year, Maurice Clarke said his goal is to deliver high-quality work at neighborhood prices.

“They’re spending the money for the same services somewhere. Why not get the same services near their home?” he said.

With more than 30 years in the beauty industry, Clarke is up to the task. Among his career highlights: being  recruited by the military to turn around the main salon at Fort Belvoir, managing a prominent K Street salon for 10 years and working for Nexxus Salon Hair Care as its East Coast director of education.  

Clarke wants his clients to leave the salon looking and feeling better. He also feels very responsible for his employees, or partners as he prefers to call them. And he also knows that as an African-American businessman, fair or not, he has even more of a reason to want to succeed.

“I have to wear the jacket for both things,” he acknowledges. He remembers early in his career how people would tell him he reminded them of Martin Luther King Jr., meaning they felt comfortable around him. But as America celebrates Black History Month, Clarke said such accomplishments should be celebrated every day. More important to him is what gets accomplished day after day, and how much we all have in common.

“There’s sugar in everyone’s house,” he said. And he makes clear that Escape is not a black spa or a white spa. “Hair is hair,” and “green is green,” he said. With the right training, one “should be able to do any hair,” he said.

Escape didn’t start out as a full-service salon, where you can get everything from a haircut and blow-dry to a couples massage to a “Day at Escape.” At a time when Lorton was being transformed by an influx of new housing and retail ventures, Escape opened in Lorton Market in 2007 as a quick-service nail salon. In 2008, a client asked Clarke to help advise some investors who were interested in turning Escape into something more.  

At the time, the Kingstowne resident was working as a consultant and looking toward retirement with his wife, a retired soldier now working as a government contractor.  But Clarke said it became clear that the group didn’t have enough money to transform Escape.  

“This was the last thing that I expected to do,” he said. But it was an up-and-coming location, he knew how to run a successful business and he knew he could make things better for the people that worked there. So last April, Clarke found himself the owner of a salon for the second time in his life (his first was in Woodbridge in the 1980s.)

But the experience wasn’t relaxing for anyone.

Eight manicurists quit because they didn’t want to work for an African-American. Some customers were unhappy with the structure Clarke imposed: no more popping in for a full-service manicure at 10 minutes before closing, for example.  But he wondered, “Why couldn’t they appreciate how clean the salon was now, or that there was soap in the bathroom?”

Although he was in the salon every day, all day, Clarke didn’t want people to know he was the owner to prevent the criticism from becoming racially charged.

Still the digs came. And they still do. Clarke said he still fights the perception that he’s being “uppity” when he advocates for his salon. But then there’s one client who didn’t warm to him initially who recently told him that she was glad an American had taken over Escape. 

Business is picking up, but still has a ways to go before it’s where Clarke wants it to be. He is looking ahead to the growth coming at Fort Belvoir. And to a time when people just look at him as a successful businessman who owns a salon where customers want to return again and again.

It’s about reaching a “level of accomplishment to where you can’t distinguish whether I’m black or white,” he said. “You just succeed.”