Cheating on Your Barber

Barber Cameron Safack chats with Caleb Richards, 19, in East Duluth on Nov. 15, 2023. Safack has been cutting Caleb's hair since the beginning of his freshman year. Photo by Mo Ornat.

“I wanna be the next Nike, but better,” Cameron “Cam” Safack, 20, said without breaking concentration on his latest client’s haircut.

With the steady buzz of a clipper in the background, he continued.

“It'd be like that but the whole brand idea is about thinking outside the box, like doing whatever you'd like since it’s not institutionalized in the system. Just out of the box thinking.” 

The brand, which Safack alludes to is his own business and passion project: “CamzCutz”. Safeck is a freelance barber who is paying his way through school by combining his passion, work ethic and meticulous artistic eye to provide a service that is in a deficit within Duluth. 

Caleb Richards, 19, has been getting regular haircuts from Safack since starting at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Before seeing Safack, Richards regularly saw the same barber as his father in the cities. While settling into Duluth he began going to Safack. 

“I came up here and was like yeah I need a barber. But if I didn’t know Cam I would've waited the whole semester to wait and get a cut,” said Richards.

Loyalty to a barber is a very real thing. UMD freshman Aiden Valdez, 18, strongly stands by his opinion.

“You can’t cheat on your barber,” he said.

“You feel kinda guilty going back after you’ve got your haircut somewhere else,” he paused and continued.

“But you need a barber who’s gonna be accessible.”

Accessibility and skill are two of the most important traits for a barber. For a lot of new college students that switch is a scary step to make, especially with a limited number of barbers on hand that are skilled with different hair textures. A majority of clients, like Richards, have said that they would oftentimes wait to go to the cities just to see their regular barber. But what makes CamzCutz so special that floods of students are putting their trust in it? The clean-cut answer is Cam Safack. 

“A lot of barbers that I know cut coarse hair, like black hair. But the thing that separates a lot of barbers is being able to cut hair for just anybody on the street. And being able to give them a good cut. That’s a skill right there. I just had a lot of different races of friends growing up and I wanted to be able to cut their hair,” Safack said.

“When I cut my friends' hair I genuinely wanted them to feel good about getting a good haircut.” 

Safack brings to the table a high-demand blend of skill, enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit that has successfully made a name for himself in the Duluth community and more specifically around the UMD campus. He is known around the community and his name is often brought up when the need for a barber is at hand.

A junior at UMD, and longtime CamzCutz client, Leon Oganda, 20, spoke on Safack’s character as a barber: “Cam is someone that’s always looking to improve and that’s really reflected in his cuts.”

This skill and precision wasn’t an overnight thing.

“I think the craziest part too is that the first time I picked up any type of device or instrument to cut hair was in like 6th grade. I cut my own hair with it, it was like my mom’s eyebrow razor tool,” Safack said. 

“I kept going. It was just constant progression.”

The progression became a constant theme in Cam’s work. He began to cut his father’s hair, then for some friends, and continued from there. Once in college, his dorm room became the designated place for a cut, and now, the unique thing about Safack’s business is that he can cut wherever. Being a freelance barber allows him the freedom to cut hair when and where the need is, which is helpful since his clientele is spread across Minnesota. Safack also says that being freelance and not tied down to one spot has a lot of benefits.

“I don't want a barbershop feel when I’m cutting hair. I wanna have it just one on one and make sure we can both be comfortable,” he said. 

“There’s times when people have told some very deep personal stories that you couldn’t tell in a barbershop. So I’ll just sit down and talk to them. So in a sense too, I’m like a therapist. Cause’ a lot of guys think ‘I don’t need no damn therapy I just need my barber’. So I guess I'm just that guy. The whole haircut experience with CamzCutz is deeper than a haircut, people will say they sat in my chair and left feeling like a different person.”

The brand of CamzCutz goes further than the barber chair. In 2022 he started introducing a line of merchandise particular to his business and kept the ball rolling. Safack now sells socks, shirts, sweatshirts and more all branded with the personalized “CC” logo.

As much as Safack is in the business of haircuts, he is more so in the business of creating community within the brand he has cultivated.

“I just want to give people their confidence back. I know a clean cut can make you feel just a little better. Not a lot of people are willing to make that switch,” Safack said.

“I could cut better but I’m not targeting any barber when I say that, just come and try something new.”