We recently connected with Missy Caris and have shared our conversation below.

Missy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

2023 marks Primped’s 9th wedding season! We have grown our team of artists and that has come with some awesome advantages that set us apart. Having a bigger team gives us more of an emergency buffer, in the unfortunate event that an artist becomes sick on someone’s wedding day, as we have more people to help out in the case of an emergency. It also allows us to make sure we are pairing each client with an artist who will be a great fit for that person’s specific style. While all of our artists are well rounded and can do hair and makeup on a full spectrum of skin tones and facial features, different hair types and textures, by having a bigger team we naturally have people who specialize more in specific areas or styles. By asking each client for inspiration photos and/or to describe the style they are envisioning, we can determine which of our artists would be the best fit for each unique client.

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?

Primped was launched in 2015, and is co-owned by two best friends Missy and Victoria. With Missy’s background in business and Victoria’s background in the beauty industry, they combined their mutual background in customer service and Primped was born. Primped is a boutique style onsite hair and makeup company specializing in weddings and special events. We have found it to be very beneficial to have different people focused on separate aspects of Primped. We have Victoria specializing more on the creative and education side, and then Missy focused more on the behind the scenes side of running the business and a lot of the communication with clients. We also have Laura, our awesome business manager, and Justine as another administrative assistant who works directly with our clients throughout the process. This powerhouse of a team allows us to put customer service front and center, and make sure that each client is getting the unique attention they deserve with prompt and detail oriented communication throughout the process.
We take great pride in helping each woman see her own personal beauty shine bright. Our customized attention to your hair, skin and makeup will ensure that on your special day, you will be uniquely, meticulously beYOUtiful.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I mean…..COVID-19, need we say more? It was a major struggle for all small businesses to get through the pandemic, but here we are. We made it! We went from gearing up to head into another busy wedding season that spring, to a complete halt. Like so many others, we had to find a way to navigate through the challenges of not being able to work and not having work to offer our team, figuring out how to help countless clients reschedule their weddings and events, all while having no income stream coming in. There was no handbook for how to get through something like that. We all just tried to keep our heads up and kept powering through the storm. There were definitely times where we felt like maybe it would just be easier to give up, but we didn’t want to let any of our clients down, so we persevered and it paid off in the end. We all learned a lot during that time.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

When we first started Primped, Victoria and I had become moms and thought that this would allow us to do something we loved and have more time to spend with our kids while they were little. However, we soon learned that is not often how it goes when starting up a business.

Early on, we met a woman named Julie Swenson (now Jules Annen) who changed the trajectory of our new business. She owned her own onsite hair and makeup company. She was wanting to take a step back from running her business and focus more on doing hair and makeup for the events her company had booked. She found our new up and coming company and had an idea to funnel her business to us, which would allow her to work the events she wanted while we would focus on the business aspect of managing those bookings and taking that work off her plate. This helped us gain traction and build up our reputation a lot faster. Meeting Jules was a gift, and she became somewhat of a business mentor to us during those early years.

We grew explosively, which was a wonderful thing. However, it was also very challenging. Instead of having more free time, we had less. We both worked other full time jobs at the time, so we were stretched thinner than ever. We were working around the clock. We grew much faster than we anticipated, so we didn’t have a lot of processes fully worked out yet and had to figure it out on the fly. This meant we were manually tracking a lot of information, and it took us a lot longer to streamline certain processes because we felt like we were always trying to catch up.

Eventually, we started to learn how to let go of certain things and not feel like we had to be in complete control of every single task. We needed help simply because there weren’t enough hours in the day to be able to do it all alone. Getting to the point of being able to hire a business manager and another assistant was a huge milestone. Through the help of Laura and Justine, we were able to make time to streamline processes, which led to an even smoother experience for our clients and helped us to achieve some work life balance.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.primpedmn.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/primpedmn/ (or just our handle is @primpedmn)
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063778530833

Image Credits
Katherine Chapman photo Celisia Stanton Whitley Sander Jen Hillenga