People call her the unofficial mayor of Tacoma. But she’s thinking about moving
It was a Wednesday, about four years ago, and Mattice Hoyt was having a bad day.
She was worried about making enough money to cover costs for her store in Central Tacoma, Mattice Beauty Supply. Outside the store, a pandemic raged. In-person customers were hard to come by, and she made a total of $23 that week.
Seated in a motorized chair – which she relies on to get around after losing both her legs to cancer – Hoyt cried, overwhelmed by it all. Until a customer walked in, and she pulled herself together.
After looking around briefly, the customer came to the front and suddenly broke down into tears. She confessed to Hoyt that she was recently diagnosed with cancer, was starting to lose her hair and didn’t know how to manage it all. So Hoyt grabbed a chair and a bottle of water for the customer, closed the door to the store, and had a heart-to-heart with her.
“I just said, ‘Hey, it’s just me and you.’ I took my head wrap off so she could see I didn’t have any hair, either. And I said, ‘Show me three pictures of when you felt the most you, and I will do my best to find a wig that’s closest to it,’” Hoyt said. “Or, (expletive) it. This is a rebirth of you. Wear the red one, or wear the blue bob.”
Hoyt’s customer laughed. They exchanged stories on how they dealt with cancer treatment, and the two tried on wigs together until the customer found one she wanted to buy.
When she was ready to leave, “she got to the back doors, turned around, she said, ‘This the first time that I feel like I can actually beat this,’” Hoyt said of the customer.
Hoyt has many stories like that one: Instances of people finding their way to her store, people in need or people looking to help those in need. Hoyt said she wants to serve her community through every aspect of her business. Hoyt, who is Black, said her business is one of the only Black-owned beauty supply stores in the area – a type of store that is largely patronized by Black women. She endeavors to stock products that don’t contain toxic chemicals, products that help her customers manage and care for curly hair instead of products that seek to tame it into submission.
“Who better to know about our hair than us?” she told The News Tribune.
Its been five years since she has been in business at 3906 S. 12th St, and she’s beloved in Tacoma for her involvement in the community and her candid personality. But Hoyt is starting to think it might be time to call it quits – and she doesn’t know where she’d go.
“I just feel like I’ve given so much to Tacoma,” she said. “If my business doesn’t make it, we’re moving in a year.”
A tough start
Hoyt, 39, has faced challenges in keeping her store afloat since the beginning.
Born in California, she has lived most of her life in Washington. She moved from Seattle to Tacoma around 2008 since she was able to buy a house in town, and worked in commercial insurance for a time.
A few years later, she started working on opening Mattice Beauty Supply, six years before it was actually supposed to open. Her grand opening was scheduled for March 20, 2020, nine days after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. She kept it open without getting a single customer until November that year, and still came in every day in hopes that the inventory she ordered to stock the store finally came in.
She didn’t qualify for a lot of COVID relief funding for small businesses because many grants only applied to businesses that had been around since well before the pandemic. She depleted her savings to cover costs and then took out equity on her house to keep things going. Though she’s able to cover costs to run the business every month with the help of a loan she took out back when her store officially opened, she’s never been able to make enough to pay herself a real salary through the store, Hoyt said. Her husband and co-owner Chris Hoyt doesn’t officially work at the store and has a day job delivering medical supplies.
But “I always say that the only reason why the store is still here is because he takes care of all the bills at home,” Hoyt said.
“Even though you don’t see Chris here, half of this business is him,” she added.
Hoyt finally got her first customer in December of 2020. Then, in March 2021, she got a cancer diagnosis and had to have surgery to amputate both her legs.
“And then I was in the hospital until the beginning of June, that was when I finally got back out. It sounds like jail,” she laughed.
Despite all the challenges she faced, she knew she wanted to sell as many Black-owned products as she could. And she knew she wanted to set aside space in her store to serve as a “community room.” It’s a room in the back stocked with snacks, craft supplies and a big spacious table and chairs. She hosts classes that range from arts and crafts to financial management to emergency preparedness that she asks customers to pay for on a sliding scale to ensure they’re accessible to everyone. Though other business owners have told her she’s wasting “valuable retail space” by doing so, Hoyt doesn’t care.
“We all have to participate in capitalism, but we don’t have to be a slave to it,” she said.
A friend started a GoFundMe for her in April with a fundraising goal of $100,000 to help her pay back the loan she took out on her house. As of Sept. 18, it had raised $13,134.
A household name
In the midst of the chaos of getting her store up and running, Hoyt started to tune in to Tacoma City Council meetings. She’d come into the store every day in 2020 just to see if the inventory she ordered had been delivered, since things were delayed given the global shipping industry’s pandemic-related slowdown. While she was at the store waiting, she’d put a meeting on and keep track of what was going on at city hall.
She kept up with the habit even as things started to pick up, but after seeing the levels of voter turnout in the 2022 November election – 60.49% in Pierce County – she was frustrated with what she saw as a lack of civic engagement. So she started posting her thoughts on local politics on her Instagram account, @mattice_beauty_supply.
“I just started realizing a lot of people just didn’t know what was going on. They just didn’t know. And so I was like, ‘Oh, maybe if I can start sharing it, more people will know about it,’” she said.
In 2025, Hoyt is now something of a local celebrity on Instagram with almost 6,000 followers. She posts regularly about her experiences as a business owner in Tacoma and about council meetings, and now the upcoming council elections. When she’s able to attend a candidate forum, she tracks the questions candidates are asked and the answers they provide and posts about it on her Instagram story for those who can’t attend.
People in Tacoma sometimes call her “the unofficial mayor of Tacoma” – council member Joe Bushnell acknowledged the nickname when presenting Hoyt with the award for “Champion of Civic Engagement” at the city’s 29th annual City of Destiny Awards in June.
“Known affectionately by many as the ‘unofficial mayor of Tacoma’ – yeah, that’s right, let’s clap for that,” Bushnell said at the ceremony. “Mattice is more than just a business owner. She’s a mentor, movement builder and community amplifier.”
She has more recently parlayed her citizen journalism into a few pieces for Grit City Magazine. Hoyt recalls a piece she wrote recently after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, reminding readers that while all eyes were on the federal government, it’s Tacoma’s local government that most affects its residents’ day-to-day lives.
“It was like, ‘Yeah the president sucks, but we got to pay attention to local government,’” Hoyt said.
Hoyt wouldn’t refer to herself as a political analyst or influencer. She just likes to read, and describes herself as deeply curious, always asking why things are the way they are.
“I was definitely an annoying kid,” she said. “I was a ‘why’ kid, and I’m a ‘why’ adult.”
Community support – or a lack thereof
Hoyt has encountered no shortage of obstacles in getting her store off the ground. But the popularity of the videos she posts dissecting complicated city issues or joking about the bored looks on council members’ faces during long meetings has not translated into a spike in sales.
She’s been frustrated recently, she said, with how much people say they’d like to support local business but still spend their money at big-box stores like Target.
“I feel like everyone knows who I am, my name is in rooms,” she said. “But people won’t shop with me.”
Hoyt’s friends are no stranger to that feeling.
TeyAnjulee Leon has known Hoyt for about four years. Leon said she’ll sometimes cover the store on her days off so Hoyt can get a break. She has seen how much Hoyt cares about people in Tacoma – some of whom might not reciprocate that care.
“I wish people understood. Even if you don’t always agree with her, what she’s saying or how she says it, there’s a lot of good that she does in Tacoma, that if she wanted to, she could just stop tomorrow,” Leon told The News Tribune.
“It matters to her most that she takes care of this community. And I just wish that people would understand that and then show up like they care,” she added.
Allyson Turk, who has known Hoyt since 2019, said Tacoma would “be at a loss” if Hoyt had to close her store.
“I think that Tacoma as a city really champions small business in theory, but we don’t champion and support small business in practice,” Turk told The News Tribune. “And so I think there’s this huge schism between theoretical support and practical and actual support.”
Hoyt hasn’t thought about what she’d do if she had to close Mattice Beauty Supply. She said she doesn’t want to change the way she operates to make a profit if it means sacrificing her values. It’s scary, she said.
“But, like I always tell people: ‘Man, I beat cancer twice. I ain’t scared of (expletive).’”
Mattice Beauty Supply is located at 3906 S. 12th St in Tacoma.
This story was originally published September 20, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
