Jimmy
Van Boxel
A career
in the craft.
Jimmy Van Boxel has stood on competition floors in Las Vegas, Vienna, Frankfurt, Athens, and Paris — and won on most of them. After a brief chapter in the music industry, he walked into a cosmetology school in his early twenties and discovered he was just as gifted with scissors as he had ever been with strings.
What followed is one of the most decorated competitive careers in American hairdressing.
On stages around the world.
First place finishes across the United States. Podium finishes in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Greece. Four World Championship appearances representing Team USA. The local paper called it the “Hair Olympics.” At 22, Jimmy Van Boxel placed in the world. He was not surprised. He just got back to work.
His father Marty was my first real trainer. Gio and I were the same age. We were on Team USA together from the beginning — from 2001 onward — and over the years we traveled the world together. Competition floors in Europe. Late nights in Paris. The kind of friendship that forms when you’re both chasing the same impossible thing in the same cities at the same time.
Giovanni passed away in 2024. He was 44 years old. He was one of the finest people I have ever known, and there is not a competition I’ve been part of that doesn’t have his fingerprints somewhere on it.
Some things you build alone. The most important ones, you don’t.
Still
meaning it.
In 2018, twenty years after walking into a hair school, Jimmy Van Boxel put on a Team USA apron and flew to Paris to compete at the World Championships of Hairdressing for the fourth time.
He was 38 years old. He had a salon, a team, a family, and every reason to watch from the sidelines. He competed anyway. Some people train to win. Jimmy trains because he cannot imagine stopping.
One chair.
A mirror.
The Atlanta project — recruited by an investment group to open the city’s largest salon and spa — collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis before a single client walked through the door. It was a significant blow. Jimmy fought through it.
Then two women from Sea Island heard about a family man from Michigan with an unusual story — the world stages, the championships, the three kids — and they invited him south. He arrived on St. Simons Island with one chair and a mirror.
What he built from that single chair became the leading salon in the Golden Isles — a destination for clients from across Georgia, the Southeast, and beyond. Fifteen years in, Uberzoot Hair Co. serves some of the most influential and accomplished people in the state of Georgia, and a handful of people whose reach extends considerably further than that.
He is still behind the chair. He still does the work himself.
The chair speaks for itself.
After two decades of competing at the highest levels of the craft — where every angle, every line, every finish is judged against the best in the world — Jimmy brings that precision to every client who sits in his chair.
The difference between a world-class competitive hairstylist and a good salon stylist is the same as the difference between a concert musician and someone who plays for fun. Both can make beautiful music. Only one has spent years being judged note by note in front of a crowd.
Jimmy accepts a limited number of new clients. The work is personal. The standard is the same as it has always been.
Giving it back.
For more than twenty years, Jimmy has taught in cosmetology schools, spoken on industry stages, and used social media to build one of the largest educational hairstyling followings in the country — over one million strong. His work and perspectives have appeared in industry publications internationally.
Beyond hair, he has served as a Champion for Safe Harbor’s Champions for Children, supporting at-risk youth in South Georgia, and contributed to the design and development of vocational schools in Accra, Ghana through Feeding the Orphans.
The discipline it takes to compete on a world stage, he believes, is the same discipline that makes someone genuinely useful to others.
He built all of this for them.
Behind every choice — the long competition seasons, the early mornings, the years of building something from one chair — there has been a wife and three children. They are the entire reason.
He is not finished.