How a box truck became one of North Philly’s favorite barbershops

Dodge Danley was getting his usual, relaxing in the reclined chair while his barber, William Sanders, who goes by Siddiq, carefully shaved his sideburns.

Sanders stepped back to assess his work. He spotted a stray whisker and moved in with the electric razor. Next to Danley was a shampoo sink, still wet from his rinse. The TV was on. Hair products lined the wall. Near the entrance, a giant LED sign glowed “OPEN.”

In almost every way, Nice Cutz looked like a typical barbershop.

Then Danley’s cut was finished, and he stepped out of the back of the truck.

You see, Nice Cutz is not quite a barbershop. It is a barber truck, parked on a North Philly corner near a Dunkin’, where Sanders, 51, cuts hair inside a business he built on wheels.

It all started around the pandemic. Social distancing made it hard for Sanders to keep cutting hair at the brick-and-mortar shop down the street where he worked, so he focused on his other business: hawking household products and women’s underwear out of a box truck he turned into a boutique. The items came from a wholesaler.

“I used to sell Victoria’s Secret products out of this truck,” he said, along with things like body wash, deodorant, and cleaning supplies.

But once the restrictions eased, his customers from the shop kept asking when he would cut hair again, so Sanders swapped ladies’ lingerie for a barber chair. Now, the same customers who once walked through the shop’s door climb the truck’s steps instead and take a seat in Sanders’ chair. Danley is one of them.

He has been getting his hair cut by Sanders every two weeks for the last six years. He first went to Sanders at the shop down the street. Now he gets his cut in the truck, which he prefers. “In the barbershop, they deal with a lot of different people,” Danley said. “Over here, it’s more intimate. It’s private.”

That privacy mattered even more last summer after Danley had a stroke. He spent months recovering at Magee Rehabilitation. At first, he could not walk or talk. He had to relearn parts of his life that had once felt automatic.

But when he needed a haircut, he knew exactly who he wanted. “We gotta get Siddiq to come cut my hair,” Danley recalled telling his fiancée at the time. So Sanders took the truck to Magee and cut Danley’s hair in his room.

It wasn’t the first time he’d traveled to cut someone’s hair. Over the years, he said, he’s gone to people in rehab facilities, nursing homes, and other places where getting a haircut is difficult.

The truck makes it much easier to meet his customers where they are. He also takes it to popular neighborhood gatherings, like back-to-school events and North Philly’s annual Carnival in the Hood. But most days, Sanders parks the truck at Broad and York and lets the customers come to him.

And they do. He sees about 10 people a day, depending on how long he stays out. He’s technically open until 6 p.m., but he’ll stay late if he needs to. “I continue cutting until there’s no one left,” Sanders said.

The truck only costs $7 per day to operate, and everything runs on a generator: the lights, the heat, the air-conditioning, the sink. The arrangement is cheaper than working in a store, Sanders said, where he had to cover overhead costs like renting the chair and insurance.

Sanders has been thinking in practical terms since he was a teenager. He learned to cut hair around 15 in Frankford, where the barbers he and his friends saw often worked out of their houses. One day, a friend did not have enough money for a haircut, so Sanders offered to do it himself. He did such a good job that his friend never went back to the professional barber.

Then Sanders’ stepfather bought him his first pair of clippers and asked for a haircut. He never went back to his regular barber either. Sanders was a natural. Later, he got his barber license and his manager license, which allows him to teach. He hasn’t cut hair continuously his whole life, but the skill has always been there when he needed it.

The same practical thinking shaped Sanders’ decision to operate out of a truck. The barbers he grew up going to did not need storefronts. They needed a chair, clippers, and people who knew where to find them. Sanders built a larger version of that idea on the curb. With the truck, Sanders can work on his own terms for less money.

Now Nice Cutz has become a kind of proof of concept for other neighborhood entrepreneurs. They come in for haircuts but leave daydreaming about business opportunities. “Whatever they’re into, they look at the structure of [the truck], and it makes them think outside the box,” Sanders said.

Take Danley, for example. After his stroke, once he was walking again, he bought a truck of his own. Sanders’ setup had given him an idea for a mobile podcast studio. He’s going to use the truck to record episodes of his recovery-themed podcast “Surviving the Hit.” The truck has room for guests, so he can interview fellow stroke survivors, and when he’s not busy, he’ll rent it out to other podcasters.

Inspiration, it seems, is just another way Nice Cutz serves the community.

By early afternoon, Sanders was getting ready to lock up the truck when Cleo Randall walked over.

Randall, 50, has known Sanders since childhood. He had been riding past Nice Cutz for a while, he said, and feeling bad about not stopping in. When he realized Sanders was being interviewed for the newspaper, he lit up.

“You couldn’t be out here with a better person,” Randall said. “He’s always supporting the neighborhood, serving the neighborhood, taking care of people who don’t have money. All of the above.”

Sanders smiled and quickly moved the conversation along. He pointed across the street, where people were waiting for a food bank to open in a few hours.

“They be waiting out there all day,” Sanders said.

The line had given him another idea. Sanders recently got a food cart, which was now sitting in front of the truck. He plans to use it to give away hot dogs and sausages to his neighbors waiting across the street.

“It’s just something I do,” Sanders said.