We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bylle Stasi. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bylle below.
Bylle, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s something crazy on unexpected that’s happened to you or your business
I feel like I’ve seen so much, especially in this town! I guess the strangest thing had to be the time I had a woman who was African royalty come in for lash extensions. Her appointment was booked online and her driver arrived a few hours before her appointment and paid me in cash for the whole service and then some. She arrived in a large black SUV and had an entourage waiting for her in the waiting area. She spoke a language that was mostly clicking sounds but tried her best to explain what she wanted and I think she may have shown me a picture or something. She used a translation app on her phone to speak with me throughout her appointment and told me that it was her husband’s birthday. She said she had to look better than the other wives. That part is what was shocking to me. Some other things I noticed about her were also very strange but the thought that she had to compete for her husband’s attention was so odd to me and it put tremendous pressure on me. Fortunately she left happy so I hope it all worked out for her.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Well, I studied acting for a very long time like many people in LA. At some point I just wanted more financial control in my life so I went to beauty school and did hair and make-up for a few years after that. A client from London was wearing lash extensions and I was obsessed with how they looked so I sought out a teacher here. I happened to learn and get all my practice in right before the trend really hit LA so once it did, the rest is history. Clients seem to love not having to spend time on eye make-up every day. They can go to the gym and look just as amazing as they do when they go out for brunch.
What sets my service apart is the professionalism and care you get. Clients have options for easy booking, an extremely comfortable setting for their service, fantastic application and streamline checkout. The thing I’m most proud of is our own product line. Nothing is ordered that I don’t use in a service so there is nothing in my product line that you wouldn’t see me using.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
Since I have been practicing yoga for more than half my life now, I would have to say the imagery in the Bhagavad Gita has helped me most in business. There are so many lessons in both the Gita and Patanjali’s sutras about one-pointededness, something I understood early in life but have let it mature in me lately. We live in a time where lots of things scream for our attention, mostly through screens. Social media is so full of “get rich quick” schemes and living in LA, so many business ideas come at you but there aren’t enough lifetimes to do them all. Doing one business well takes all of you but if you’re doing it with pure intention and one-pointedness, it doesn’t feel like work. The focus feels meditative and fulfilling, even if you have other things going on in your life. Once it feels like a burden you have to step back and look again or move on and leave it alone.
In the Gita, the main character Arjuna forgets what a great warrior he has been trained to be once he is actually faced with battle. He gets distracted by nostalgia and negative consequences of war, but if he doesn’t fight like the warrior he is trained to be all that he knows and loves will be detroyed anyway. He was at a time where there was no going back to how things used to be, there was only movement forward or death. There is a specific story that I love. When he was a young archery student, his teacher, Dhrona, took he and his cousin out to shoot. Dhrona had tied a red string around the neck of a parrot and set the bird off before the boys arrived. Dhrona asked Arjuna’s cousin, Duryodhana, to point his arrow into the tree and tell him what he sees. Duryodhana says he sees he sees a parrot sitting on a branch surrounded by branches and fruit. Dhrona then asks Arjuna to do the same and tell him what he sees. Arjuna says “I see a red string.” This is the one-pointedness that we need for success in anything. A big picture view is fine but too much big picture can keep you fearful and from proper execution. Lots of people are afraid to spend time on carving out a craft but that kind of discipline can teach us everything we need to know about ourselves and keep us from grasping onto all of the distractions that come at us.
Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.
Product is one of the hardest things to take on, especially when you are used to being a service provider. But, for me, I had owned a fitness business once in my early 20’s and I learned that only providing service or education meant not only leaving a lot of money on the table, but also kept things from being complete in relationship to your customer. If the customer trusts you in education or service, then they will trust you with products, which means they will trust you again with more of everything. That’s how you become a part of each other’s lives and retention is built. So, it took me ten years of doing lash extensions to know what worked and why as an artist and I wanted to share that knowledge with other artists. But then I had the intense task of sourcing those products and finding out who was manufacturing the things I loved. That’s not something you can just ask another company and while I won’t say how I went about that, I will say it was expensive and time consuming to test it all. Most of my products come from different sources in Korea and there is no magic drop shipping program where you just slap your label on something already being sold by tons of other companies. There was also a language barrier and I had to narrow everything down to only the products I actually use on my clients so that I could afford a great brand. The product all comes to LA and is checked before being added to inventory. Lash artists who use my product have a personal relationship with me already and I am always giving them samples to test for me to get their feedback. Right now, I’m working towards another pro line for STAY and then my goal in the next couple of years is to have the same quality in consumer products. Right now, I only have a lash bath for consumers but I would like to do more.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.staycosmetics.co/
- Instagram: @byllethekid
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/staycosmetics
Image Credits
Stasi Photography