Luxury clothier and salon for men is quickly taking off, with help from Florida SBDC at FIU

Walk into Jaxson Maximus on the ground floor of a glittering high-rise in Brickell area of Miami, and you’ll find a bustling luxury custom clothier, a full-service tailor shop and a salon for men all in one shop.

Madison Boehm, who had recently graduated from the University of Houston with a business degree and had been working as a consultant, came up with the idea for this new business. When she was in high school she would visit her father’s workplace, a men’s custom clothier, and help him out. That clothier also partnered with a men’s salon and they shared a customer base. She thought, let’s take that concept a step further and combine the concepts into one shop. And who better to have as a co-founder and business partner but her father, Christian Boehm, who has been a president or VP of several custom clothiers and men’s clothing brands.

Madison and Christian [pictured above] had always wanted to move to Miami, and they also thought that the city, with its metropolitan lifestyle and a fashion-forward customer base. would be the perfect location for the business.

Madison moved to Miami first, in 2018, to begin setting up the business after they signed a lease in the Panorama building for the future Jackson Maximus location. “It took us about a year to build out the retail concept and build up a showroom with permits and everything else that comes with launching,” she says. Her father followed about eight months later in time to help with hiring employees and getting ready for a grand opening.

The grand opening in November 2019 turned out to be not as grand as they hoped, because the pandemic followed a few months later. But in retrospect, Madison says, it gave them a chance to grow at a slower pace and adjust to the current realities at the time. The business began to take off in late 2020 and early 2021. “Now we have a great foundation and reputation in Brickell. We’re getting a lot of referrals,” she says.

With Madison’s consulting background, she heads up the finance and logistics part of the business as the company’s chief operating officer. Her father, the CEO, handles business development and more of the customer-facing business building.

While owning a business with family members can bring challenges, she says overall it’s working well. “We have a good understanding what he’s good at, and what I’m good at, and they are kind of the opposite. He does one side of the business and I do the other side and we have a good tag team mix over the two.”

A challenge they have faced is staffing. “It’s finding the right people. Because we hold ourselves to a higher standard, I just don’t want to hire like any willy nilly barber or clothier that comes in the door. They have to have the technical expertise but also the personality to fit with our clientele.”

Jaxson Maximus employs about 25 people, including full-time and part-time positions.

Now it is about expanding the business. “We’re launching our ready to wear athleisure line to the wholesale and e-commerce sides. We’re trying to get the brand in major retailers. We’re building out the team to help with the expansion of that,” Madison says. Also, Jaxson Maximus plans to build a design lab somewhere in Miami, since they’ve run out of space in their in the Brickell location.

Madison has been working with the team at Florida SBDC at FIU, the small business development center within the university’s College of Business that provides no-cost business consulting to small businesses in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties. Nile Kirec an SBDC at FIU consultant and specialist in marketing, branding, communications and business strategy, has been working with her since 2019.

“Nile has seen us grow up from nothing to now, and it’s been super helpful to have her guidance” all along the say, Madison says. In the early days, that included assistance and guidance on everything from the website, to staffing, to product expansion. Recently, that assistance included helping Madison and the company’s general manager figure out what was working and what was not in social media marketing, and overhauling their social media strategy.

“The biggest focus of us right now is trying to get outside of the four walls of just Miami and Brickell. The business is great here locally, but we’re trying to expand the brand to build a bigger presence online,” Madison continues. “We’re trying to expand the brand so we’re not just tied to in-store sales — we can have that other stream of revenue so if the business slows down at one point or seasonality, we have another form of revenue that can offset that.”

In the next three to five years, Madison and Christian also aim to open up more retail locations.

Madison’s advice to entrepreneurs?

“Talk to a lot of people that know a lot more than you do. I think a lot of mistakes people make, especially since you’re kind of young and cocky, is you go in there thinking you know everything… I think nine times out of 10, people are going to help you out. People that own businesses can sympathize with that because we all went through it at some point or another.”

Hire people that are a lot smarter than you in their areas of expertise, she says. For instance, Madison knew nothing about running a salon so when she set out to hire a general manager, she looked for someone highly experienced in that side of the business.

Lastly, take advantage of local and online resources available to entrepreneurs. Many of them are free. This includes your local SBDC office and even some government programs like incubators, she says.