Jasmin Stewart-Handy had just moved to Lincoln and was looking for a place to buy hair.
She’d grown up in Los Angeles, a city where shops that sold extensions and wigs were everywhere, but Lincoln was different.
“Where can I get some black hair around here?” the mother of two young sons asked after she stopped in a chain beauty supply store and found nothing.
Just one place was the answer.
Total Image Unlimited, Evelyn and Anthony Kelley proprietors.
Evelyn was behind the counter in the small shop on Randolph Street that day in 2002 when Stewart-Handy walked in.
“She was just so welcoming, like a breath of fresh air,” Stewart-Handy said.
The owners have retired to Scottsdale, Arizona, now, nearly 20 years after they started their business with “$500 and a prayer,” said Anthony Kelley.
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Evelyn was the driving force behind the business, he said. A woman who always wanted to be her own boss.
“That's why she is known in our family as ‘The Boss Lady.’ She has the ideas and I put things together. We always work as a team.”
Anthony was working full-time at the Lincoln Regional Center in the late '90s. The former professional baseball player began selling ball caps and jerseys and jackets out of the trunk of his car in a parking lot at 27th and Holdrege streets.
He started consigning the clothing at Jai Jai’s Salon down the road and in 1999 the Randolph Street store opened — Evelyn had grown weary of driving to Omaha for her hair needs, so they added hair care -- with a second store at Gateway Mall selling men’s and women’s clothing.
Today, Total Image is tucked in tight at 125 S. 27th St., a small brick storefront with a blue awning.
You’ll find I’sha Kelley inside, one of the Kelleys’ three kids and the woman who has taken over the shop.
“She’s got that flair, just like her parents did,” Stewart-Handy says.
The business has changed since the 37-year-old officially took charge, with social media specials and a steady online presence, email coupons to entice customers, new clothing lines and an aesthetician specializing in eyebrows and lashes.
The “500-pound cash register” her parents used is gone, replaced by paperless transactions, although the customer service remains unchanged.
It’s what they built the business on, I’sha Kelley says.
Stewart-Handy remembers that early customer service when she found out the check she’d written for her hair care wasn’t going to clear the bank. Evelyn was happy to hold it for her so she didn’t owe the fee.
“It’s why I became a lifelong fan, that trust,” she said. “Where I come from, people don’t do that.”
Customer appreciation, Anthony Kelley said. “We appreciate each and every one of them.”
And the second-generation owner is a walking advertisement for what the Kelley family built.
“Everything in my shop, from the clothing to the hair to the products, I use,” I'sha Kelley says.
She’s made other changes since she took over a year ago, downsizing the clothing section, focusing on quality over quantity.
She carries brands that are hard to come by in Lincoln, Kelley says, lotions and hair butter and hair in every color, sold to a clientele that represents a rainbow.
“People automatically think it’s a black shop,” Kelley says. “Hair doesn’t discriminate. We have transgender customers, black, white, people with cancer, people with alopecia.”
The owner had worked at the family business on and off since before her college years, when she played guard for the Huskers her freshman year, finishing her degree at the University of Central Missouri.
After a segue into TV news production, she returned to Total Image as manager. Her parents had considered shutting down after the store was vandalized and set on fire in October 2016, but their daughter said “I don’t think so.”
Business is good, Kelley said.
She’s looking ahead to the 20th anniversary of her parents’ dream this fall.
In the early days of Total Image, her dad— “Pops”— had bought billboard space at 25th and O to give the fledgling business a boost, and three years later, he hired a local rapper and filmed a commercial.
“It was pretty dope,” the store-owning daughter says. “I’m thinking of doing something like that again.”