Which is one reason we find Frieda, who sold his company to Japan's Kao Corporation in 2002 but remains heavily involved on the creative side, sitting on this recent summer day in a mobile Frieda hair salon, fashioned from an 18-wheel truck. Fitted with everything from sinks to leather couches, it's parked for a couple of days at Manhattan's South Street Seaport before promotional stops in cities across the country, ending in Los Angeles in August.

The customers, some walk-ins and others who've booked online, are getting free consultations, shampoos and blow-outs from Frieda stylists--and of course samples of the latest line of Frieda products.

Some of these women have frizzy hair. But that's not my problem, I smile to myself, as Frieda's quick analysis continues.

"There's some frizz down here," he says briskly. Darn! Really?

"Nothing a little serum won't fix, though," he adds. He also says I should create "a little more width" at the top of my face, to counterbalance the width at the bottom. Before I have time to contemplate what "width at the bottom" might mean, we're interrupted.

"Are you John Frieda?" a young woman calls from a distance as we chat. "You're inspirational!" She asks that her name not be used because her employer doesn't know she's playing hooky. An older woman calls out to him, too: "I use all your products back home in Canada," she says.

Three community college students from Long Island find the time to duck in during a school trip to the seaport. "We made out good," exults Ashley Murphy, 20, her hands full of samples. "He took out some frizz," she says of her stylist. "I'm gonna use the serum. My mom uses it too."

Frieda isn't doing the actual styling—he hasn't touched a head of hair since the early '90s, he says, metaphorically speaking. Before sending me off with the other clients to chief stylist Harry Josh, he reminisces about his start in the business.

The grandson of a London barber and the son of a salon owner, he went to work in his teens with a prominent stylist, Leonard, where he began developing his high-profile clientele.

By the late '80s, he saw room for growth—not in expanding his namesake salons (he still owns salons in New York, Los Angeles and London) but in hair care products, a business he ran from his salon basement.