Tish and Snooky Bellomo
By Ed Avis
The NCA has a lot of fantastic vendor members with interesting back stories, but few can match the origin tale of our newest member, Manic Panic. This New York-based company, which sells a line of hair color in three styles and 60 colors, is led by sisters Tish and Snooky Bellomo, who launched it while immersed in the ‘70s-era New York punk rock scene.
But the sisters’ entertainment adventure began much earlier, when they were just preschoolers.
“Our first experience was singing and dancing for baloney when our parents would go to the butcher shop,” Snooky remembers. “I think we were living around Inwood, in Manhattan, and we would just sing and dance and the butcher would give us slices of baloney for doing that.”
The girls moved on from dancing in a butcher shop to holding puppet shows for neighborhood kids through their ground-floor bedroom window. Their business sense was already emerging: The shows were free but they sold Kool-Aid to the audience at intermission.
When they reached high school age they were admitted to New York’s High School of Music and Art. Snooky entered the music program there and Tish did the art program. Their urge to entertain continued during those years.
“We always loved performing and we would just go up to people on the street sometimes and say, ‘Would you like to see a tap dance for a quarter?’” Snooky says.
Soon the Bellomo sisters graduated from tap dancing for quarters to singing and dancing in clubs. In 1973 they took their talents to an off-Broadway show called the Palm Casino Review, which was a Vaudeville-like series of short acts. That show led to one of the most important events in their career: They met Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, the co-founders of the punk and new wave band Blondie.
“They came back stage after the show and asked us if we'd like to come to their rehearsal,” Tish says. “And so a couple of days later we went to the rehearsal, and then we were in the band.”
The sisters were backup singers in Blondie for about a year. The group briefly disbanded after some key performers left, and when Harry and Stein restarted the group later, the new version did not require backup singers.
But by then Tish and Snooky had another gig going: They had realized that the “look” of the punk scene – which they were masters of -- fascinated a lot of people, so they opened a retail store, Manic Panic, to sell hair color, clothing and other punk-related merchandise.
“We would be out at the clubs or on stage, and everybody loved how we dressed, and our whole look, and our makeup and hair,” Snooky says. “So we thought, ‘Let's open a store and sell our look, as a sideline to our singing career,’ little dreaming that it would take over our lives. At the time we just sold whatever we liked, we had no business experience. Neither of us went to business school. So we just figured it out as we went along and we just sold everything from clothing, and shoes, and cosmetics, and hair color, to magazines, and records, and just everything punk rock. It was the first punk store in America.”
The first Manic Panic store was at 33 St. Mark’s Place in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. The grand opening was on July 7, 1977 – 7/7/77 – a lucky date if there ever was one. Business did not boom at first, but enough punk-loving customers found their store to cover the bills.
Eventually word spread about the quality and variety of hair dyes the store offered and by about 1980 they were wholesaling those products to other retailers. Before long wholesaling was the primary part of the business.
A turning point came in 1994: “Our supplier of the hair dyes started selling to our customers behind our backs even though we were supposed to be the exclusive distributor, and they weren’t able to ship to us in a timely fashion anymore,” Snooky remembers. “So we found the person who originally made the formula for the dyes and he created a new set of them to our own specifications.”
The sisters found a manufacturer to produce the dyes for them, and from that point on they had complete control of their product. They made sure that the dyes were vegan and not tested on animals. They had about a dozen colors at that time and they added more as inspiration hit them. Today they have 60. They also expanded the formats – they now have semi-permanent dye, temporary spray dye, and “Dye Hard,” which is combination of temporary dye and hair gel, which is perfect for customers who want to color and spike their hair in one step.
Their most recent addition to the line are the Supernatural colors – five natural colors that customers can use for color correcting or to cover other color if they need to return to a less colorful look.
“It’s a conditioning color, very mild,” Tish explains. “And you can mix it with some of our more extreme shades to get in-between shades.”
The sisters closed the original retail location of Manic Panic in 1989, (by then it had moved several times) but their punk-connected journey continues. They are planning to open a punk museum to commemorate the music scene that launched their business, and they are developing licensing deals to capitalize on the Manic Panic name. The licensing deals started with beauty products such as bath bombs, but Snooky and Tish hope to eventually expand to clothing, shoes and accessories.
And the sisters, who donate a minimum of 15 percent of profits to charity, are excited to be NCA Vendor Members and begin working with Buyer Members. They have created a set of products that they recommend stores begin with (see below) and they have created a generous discount in the NCA Buyer’s Group (click here to see the Buyer's Group listings).
“We’re independently owned and operated and have been for the last 44 years,” Snooky says. “We love the idea of Mom and Pop stores and that’s our roots, that’s where we came from. We love independent stores.”
Recommended Manic Panic Start-Up Collection for NCA Member Stores
Classic semi-permanent hair color: Display comes with 36 pieces of Top 12 colors:
Ultra Violet, Vampire Red, Hot Hot Pink, Atomic Turquoise, Cotton Candy Pink, Electric Lizard, Purple Haze, After Midnight Blue, Wildfire, Electric Banana, Dark Star, Enchanted Forest
Dyehard temporary hair color gel:
3 displays of 16 pieces each
Goth: Raven, Virgin, Vampire Red, Purple Haze
Glam: Stiletto, Glam Gold, Raven, Virgin
Cyber: Electric Lizard, Flamingo, Electric Banana, Electric Lava
1 display of 24 pieces (6 colors): 3 Ultra Violet, 3 Silver Stiletto, 3 Rockabilly Blue, 3 Cotton Candy Pink, 6 Stardust, 6 Wildfire
To order, contact Nigel FeBland, (212) 675-3790, TheFeBlandGroup@gmail.com
Visit their website by clicking here.
To see lots of examples of Manic Panic dyes at work, click here to visit their Instagram page.
