Wrentham Barber Shop Creates a Niche in Downtown

The Wrentham Barber Shop will enter its second year in August, and owners Dave Bilotta and Mike Preite say business is already steady.

Bilotta and Preite first started together last year when they felt it was time to move on from the shop they worked at in Franklin.

“Basically, we wanted to start our own place and figured Wrentham was the perfect town,” Preite said. “It’s a good location with the Dunkin right next door. There’s a lot of exposure here.”

Preite said he has been cutting hair for the past five years. He said he used to work in security and loss prevention, but since he was starting a family, he decided to take a safer route.

“It got dangerous at times,” he said. “People sometimes came at you with knives or dirty needles. I wasn’t too keen on that. I started a family, my wife is a hairdresser and I thought she does OK with that and I looked up barber schools.”

Bilotta said he started when he was a kid, helping his father at their Norwood barber shop.

“Like every other kid, I was looking for something to do,” he said. “My father wanted me to do what he was doing so I went to school for that. I started in Norwood, but got a little bored with it. I did some other stuff, but the electronics firm, I was working for laid me off when I was 50, so I went back to barbering.”

The pair said business is much better than they expected. They said a lot of their old clients from Franklin came across the border.

“It’s been above our expectations,” Preite said. “We’re very appreciative from our Franklin clients who followed us here. Franklin, Wrentham, Norfolk, Bellingham, they’re from all over.”

Bilotta said though the business is going well now, it was a rough start for them.

“We didn’t buy out another barbershop,” he said. “We started at a brand new location, and that’s much harder. We put all the stuff together ourselves, painted, put in the lights and decorated it and took off from there. The last three months have taken off. We expect to be here for a while.”

Bilotta said since he started in the 1970s, when long hair was in fashion, he had to go back to school and learn to cut for those styles. He said he’s done a lot in the years he’s been barbering.

“We’ve put in the Bruins' logo when they were going crazy,” he said.

The pair said they’ve also done numbers, a lightning bolt and other symbols.

“Mostly simple designs, nothing too elaborate,” Preite said.

The pair said though they primarily do men’s and boys’ cuts, they sometimes do girls’ cuts as well.

“If a mother comes in with a daughter and son and she wants a trim or her bangs cut, we’ll do that for girls,” Bilotta said.

The Wrentham Barber Shop is located at 29 Franklin St. and is open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.