We were lucky to catch up with Destiny Velez recently and have shared our conversation below.
Destiny, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
to get up and just do it. No matter how tired you are, how depressed or sad never let that dictate you work ethic. No one is going to help you but you. You have to show up for yourself
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a salon owner, lash tech and content creator. I got into the beauty industry 5 years ago where I went to beauty school for hair. After I went straight into a basement and worked out of there because I didn’t want to work for anyone else but myself. learned to build a clientele and realized that hair was for me. I took a lash class and fell in love with being a lash tech, to me its worth it more than being a hairdresser personally. From there I saved my money and me and my business partner decided that we want to expand more and get out of the basement so we spent 9 months building out the salon by ourselves. her husband is a contractor and taught us how to do everything. now my salon has been open for 4 years and thriving. I also started implementing content because one to have a salon and a lash page you have to post pictures and videos ti promote your work. so I got good at that and then started doing it heavy on tiktok, I gained almost 20k followers in one month and now I am at 46k and still growing. I have worked with brands like Wet n Wild, Lancome and Curology. I love making content, I really focus more on trends, beauty and fashion, but honestly whatever I think looks cool I’m going to do it
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
When my business partner and I decided to open a salon we signed the lease to our place December of 2019 right before covid hit. I was working at Ulta and Outback Steak house at the time while lashing. So obviously everything shut down but we had a plan and we were so determined we had figured out a way to pay for this build out. Mind you our landlord still charged us rent during the build out and now we were not working so we had to figure it out. My business partner used her wedding savings and I got a job at Walgreens since it was an essential workers job and also did uber eats on my spare time to pay for all supplies we needed for this build out. After working we would go to the salon and scrape, sand, prime, put up plaster all of that good stuff and go to sleep, wake up and repeat. Once the salon finally opened it was a struggle trying to find renters and we had a couple that came and left but we weren’t making enough money from our renters that would cover the cost of bills at the salon so we had to put our own money into the salon account to keep the bills paid for a year until we finally reached full capacity of space in the salon and filled up all our renting rooms. ever since we haven’t had to put our own money into the salon anymore and we are continuing tp let the money stack up into the account so we can reinvest into future projects.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Building and audience on social media honesty wasn’t as easy as I thought. You have to be different in order to catch peoples eye, and when it came to building a following on tiktok I was honestly just being me and following the trends. Then boom, one of my tiktoks went viral, so the algorithm was pushing my videos so I was getting more engagement, then another one went viral, then another. Honestly, I spend a lot of time on tiktok watching other tiktokers and keeping up with trends. Showing personality and posting all the time will keep people invested, they want you to get personal so they can feel like you are apart of their world and so they can relate.
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