Established: 2018
Location: Auckland – Flatbush
Contact Name: Carmen Fernandes
Website: www.pamperlounge.co.nz
Business mission and vision:
To be known as an elite salon by providing high quality services catered to individual needs.
“We are a spa, hair and beauty salon and we love to pamper our clients.”
We make each and every client of us feel special and pampered by making sure we customise our services to suit their needs.
None so far as I have not entered any competition until now.
I always wanted to start my own salon as I felt I could make a difference in the services and experience provided by salons and also wanted to be my own boss.
Getting clients through the door and ensuring they return and also overcoming financial set backs are the biggest and most difficult challenges any start up business goes through.
The rent of the premises where I first started my business was very high and it was extremely difficult for me to pay the rent and wages. There was no way for me to get out of the lease and with COVID it became even worse. Luckily for me the lease was only for 2 years and I exited at the end of the lease and moved to another location with cheaper rent and much higher foot traffic and so it was a win-win for my business.
As with any new businesses it is difficult to make a profit in the first couple of years and so many times I thought of throwing in the towel but then I carried on as my husband was my mentor and encouraged me not to give up. I also thought about my staff who were both on work permit sponsored by my business and I felt bad to leave them stranded if I closed my business. Besides we kept learning from our mistakes and improving our services and eventually we were able to retain a lot of our clients who kept coming back because they loved our services. We have now managed to build a loyal customer base and also welcome new clients each day.
My business was making losses for the first 2 years but since I have moved to another location which is in a boutique mall, we have a lot of walk-ins and also loyal customer base. With cheaper rent and more clients we have managed to pull ourselves out of the red and into the black.
My business is a one-stop shop for all the pampering needs of our clients so that they don’t need to go to different salons to get different services done as the services we offer is quite comprehensive which you will find in very few salons. Besides our customer service is second to none.
Four including myself.
We do not use any contractors on a regular basis, except for Web Genius for our website and Google ranking.
Whenever there is any training being offered by any of our suppliers I do ask my staff to attend either in person or online. This ensures that my staff are skilled with the latest offering in the beauty business.
We have many happy customers who either post on our Facebook page or on our Google page about their experience in our salon. Many have highly recommended our salon, some have commented about how clean and hygienic our salon is while others have commented on our friendliness and how they felt comfortable getting their services done at our salon. This has helped us in getting many new clients.
Flexibility is one of the key benefit and also meeting different types of people each day makes the day very interesting.
My business has sponsored vouchers for community charity events and sports.
So far I have not done anything more to give back to the community but will surely do so in the future.
Last two years have been hard for small businesses and I do appreciate Web Genius sponsoring the Kiwi Business Hero Awards for small businesses.
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