We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Halie Allen. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Halie below.
Hi Halie , thanks for joining us today. We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry
Trends change like underwear in the Bridal industry, for sure. With social media the trends in makeup and hair styles are so easily influenced. Wedding trends especially. There’s more themes and with those themes come different hair styles and makeup styles. The most popular I’ve seen recently are Boho, big braids and loose curls, also, Glam Waves. As far as make up, I feel like for were seeing women want more natural, glowy, soft glam, make up, pop-up more than people who are wanting full glam recently, but there’s always a full glam bride on the books!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I started out my career in 2015 in the Modeling Industry, doing editorial shoots, runway and hair modeling for magazines, about a year after my first son was born. On a set in 2016 I met a wonderful Makeup Artist who’s work I fell in love with and we ended up getting together after the shoot and becoming friends and speaking, on mostly social media, for the next year. (I got pregnant with my second child and took a break from the industry.) In 2017, I finally pursued my passion for makeup. I reconnected with this artist and she took me under her wing and trained me. I started doing friend’s hair and makeup and then moved on to Weddings part-time, mostly weekends, in 2018 while working a full-time job. The more traction I got the more obvious it became to me that this is what I should be doing. I loved it. Last July, I quit my full-time job as an Office Manager at a Home Automation/ Low Voltage company and started doing hair and makeup full time. I now have a team of 9 amazingly talented women. Kim, Jessica, Alisha, Mira. Meighan, Kayla, Melissa, Kaylee and Olivia!
I am the Owner of Lush Beauty Bar ATL, we specialize in Luxury Bridal Hair and Makeup Services, but we do hair, makeup, makeup lessons and spray tans for any event, family photos, editorial and even set makeup. We are working at a Con for The Original’s and Vampire Diaries this August. We get to do a lot of fun things, Brides are my passion, though. I love Weddings, the energy, the Brides, there’s just something extra special about seeing a Brides face light up at your work! I think what separates us from the competition is our dedication to our clients. Everybody on our team truly has a passion for make up and hair and you can see that in our attitudes and in our work. We’re all dedicated to making sure our client has the best experience. With that, I also have admin’s available 24/7 to answer calls, emails or texts from our brides any time. Wedding planning is stressful and we take a lot of the stress off of our Brides just by being available, transparent and communicative throughout the whole process.
Another fun fact is that I also own a Bridal clothing line, Lush Beauty Bar X Bridal Collection, that offers Bridal clothing for the Bride and the entire Bridal party! It’s on our website, we make it super easy to find, order and customize clothing! When I was planning my wedding, I found it so hard to find some thing, customizable, easy and within my budget to wear on my Bachelorette and decided I wanted to offer just that to others so I created my own line!
I am also a Host on The Bridal Business Podcast. I have a passion for education in hair, make up and in the Wedding industry and me and my friend Joshua decided to create a podcast where we educate other Wedding vendors, who want to get into the industry or who are in the industry and Brides as well. Information, I feel as though, is key when it comes to wanting to be a Wedding vendor, and a Bride and I’m so happy to share my knowledge to help others!
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
I definitely think credibility in the Wedding industry is extremely important. Being not only good at what you do but being good at communication, being trustworthy and honest is so important as well. One thing I feel as though that really helps us is that we have really good reviews from clients because we are actually really good to our clients. Customer service is definitely what I feel as though has helped build our reputation. Good things come to those who do good work.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
Luckily, I had some background in managing employees prior to owning my own business, which definitely helped. But, especially in a woman-dominated industry, it can definitely get a little hard at times. Throughout the last couple of years. I have definitely learned that you can be friends with your employees, but it’s harder to make an employee out of your friend. I feel like as long as you and your employees know that your business relationships and friendships are separate you can run the business the way that you want to without either feeling like you’re stepping on egg shells or hurting people’s feelings personally.
I do have a very personal relationships with my girls as we meet once a month for company meetings to discuss their goals, the company goals and train on things they may need to work on. Again, I’m very big on education and that reflects in my employees as well. Throughout the year my employees are allowed to schedule as many one-on-one or group trainings as they want with me to make sure that their skills are honed and ready to go for every client that sits in their chair. Investing in your employees, I have found, definitely results into them investing into you and your company.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.lushbeautybaratl.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/lushbeautybaratl?igshid=MjkzY2Y1YTY=
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LushBeautyBarATL?mibextid=LQQJ4d
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/halie-wooldridge-86bb97197
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@thebridalbusinesspodcast
- Other: https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://drum.io/halieallen?fbclid%3DIwAR0gnvLt2OZyAhXf3yRJszeDuQkDzF_yRkWoRUDZlEpePgLRzCx7Dr2U8Gc&h=AT3kocYj7A6erhVz5inzujWTPr3nDP-Doj9F2Gaa1EdOVL66-SHRjqD3L5CpOvXsmD_NilKtg3vspAhsY3hDb1DTyfB-3ObfQ_8O7Bqiu8GE0rn5pZg4g8ax5-XsHvyWWr6MZu2rrvYr&s=1&mibextid=ykz3hl