We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sheyla Chavez Mendoza a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sheyla, appreciate you joining us today. We’re complete cheeseballs and so we love asking folks to share the most heartwarming moment from their career – do you have a touching moment you can share with us?

As a child, I grew up with very strict parents. I was always helping at home, my family attended church regularly, and I practically raised my two younger siblings. When I was 6 I asked my parents for a little brother. I wanted more than anything to be a big sister. I finally got the news a few years after that I’d finally become just that. Little did we know that this was going to change our family for the rest of our lives. We soon got the news that my brother on the way was going to be born with down syndrome. We didn’t know much about this but the doctors told us all the worst case scenarios and on top of that they told us that since a child like that would be more of a burden they were able to give my mom the option of an abortion. Of course regardless of the diagnosis we knew this was not even an option so all we could do was wait until he was born to see what our new life with a special needs baby would be like. I can’t lie and say it was easy because although i was only 8 years old when he was born i felt so much pressure to be the best sister i could be. When he was finally born they told us my new baby brother had a hole in his heart as well as other heart issues. At only a few months old my brother had to go through open heart surgery and a few weeks after that he would have a pace maker put inside of him to make his heart beat. It was so heartbreaking to see the little baby we wished so much for in pain and suffering with cuts, wires and tubes all over him. I vividly remember going to the hospital everyday after school and just sitting doing homework or coloring in his room while my parents would come in and out of the room to speak with all the doctors and specialist that would be working with my brother. I started getting used to being around the hospital setting, I knew all the hospital floors like the back of my hand, i made friends with the kids that were sick or recently had surgery. I also saw a lot of tears and heartache, being that my brother was in the pediatric intensive care unit id see kids and babies dying and families crying from their loss almost everyday . This was a very hard time in my life but i truly believe that thanks to this experience i have the heart that i have. I genuinely love people, my family, and life. I have learned to appreciate life and the good health that my kids and family have. It was because of this that it was my life long dream to become a nurse. Although I changed routes with my career I don’t regret it because i also am a very sensitive person so maybe it was for the best. I don’t think i could bare so much pain and heartache, it truly takes a strong person and I applaud all health workers out there. I am thankfully i have found something that makes and happy and sometimes things that may not seem alot for some can have a life changing meaning to another.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I got married right out of high school at the young age of 18. My parents only had one condition and that was to continue college. I originally was in school for nursing and a year later I had my first child. my Daughter was such an easy baby and with the help of my husband and parents I continued school. Fast forward a few years and I had my second baby but little boys are not the same as girls and it was much harder to continue school with a new born and toddler so I decided to a break from school and be a stay at home mom. After being at home for a few months a friend of mine that owns her own nail salon posted about hiring nail techs because she was going to be giving birth soon. It intrigued me because i was told that my schedule would be flexible so this seemed like something i would like to do. I thought it would be easy to jump into it because as a child my mom cleaned houses for a living and one of her clients had a huge house. Out of curiosity my mom asked the old Asian lady what she did for a living and she said she was a nail tech for many years, owned nail salons, and nail supply factories. My mom immediately told the lady that she had a 14 year old daughter that loves nails and was super interested in learned to do nails. That was a complete lie but because it never occurred to me do nails. Thanks to that the lady offered to teach me how to do nails and when i was old enough she would help me get my nail license and id work at her salon. After a year of learning from her we kind of drifted ways since she was getting older and then moved away. I kept the supplies my mom bought me and in the one year I learned basic things, my interest in nails grew. I would take my little nail kit to school and do my friends nails. I then began working at a fast food restaurant and id offer my co workers and mangers to let me do their nails for free or a tip in exchange for letting me practice. After talking it through with my husband we encouraged me to go for it and soon after i began working at my friends salon. I was so fascinated since the nail art was so advanced compared to what i learned when i was 14. I worked there for about a month learned from great artists at the salon but because i was just learning it took me longer than others to finish in a timely matter which then interfered with being with my kids. Eventually I decided to leave the salon, I was feeling discouraged, although I was learning quick it still took a lot of time away from my little ones. I told my husband i wanted to just quit and maybe just wait until my kids were a little older to get back into doin nails. He encouraged me to keep going, he’d say that even though I just started i was already getting good and people seemed to be interested in my work. My husband gave me the idea to maybe take 1 or 2 clients per day but I didn’t have a place to work so I began offering VIP house call services where I’d take all my supplies, my little table, and light to do peoples nails from the comfort of their own home. Then Shey’s Couture Nails was brown, I opened my instagram and began promoting specials, doing giveaways, and posting my work. I quickly grew and i started to become known in my area. I kept getting better and better and my clientele quickly grew. It began to get overwhelming having to travel all over the place and then decided to work from home for a little while i looked for a new place to be. My husband then offered me one of his suites at his contracting business and I was so excited to finally have a little place to make my own and be able to service all my clients. I then saw an ad about an ombré powder class in Miami and I was very intrigued. I brought the idea to my husband because although my business was doing well the course was pretty expensive plus my flight, food, etc. Since this was a fairly new thing my husband wasn’t too on board but after many times of being insistent he agreed to help me by paying for my course. I absolutely fell in love with permanent makeup. I came back home pumped and ready to add this new service to my business menu. I quickly began to get booked for this service but now i was starting to outgrow my little suite after adding the bed and all the supplies. My next step was to open my own salon and sure enough my husband got word of a building wanting his services to fix up a whole floor inside a building and he quickly asked if they’d consider giving me the contract in exchange for us fixing up the floor at our own expense. They agreed and I was going to officially open my first salon. I was extra blessed because it was able to open salon suites and also my main salon with half of it being a nail salon and the other half a permanent makeup salon and as a whole we are Shey’s Couture Beautique.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

For my birthday I recently went to a life changing permanent makeup event. Over 20 speakers that specialize in different areas of the PMU world taught me new techniques and services from lip blush, dreamy eyeliner, scalp micropigmentation, stretch mark camouflage, and marketing. I was able to fly to Florida and attend this 4 day event. I was only doing 2 services in permanent makeup but my nail clientele wouldn’t allow me to take full focus on PMU but after learning so much and networking with amazing women and business owners from all over the country I left so inspired. I recently announced that I will be semi retiring from Nails and will shift my focus to all things permanent makeup. I will always have a space for nails in my heart, after all it was the reason I was able to get my foot into the beauty world and I do not want to leave it completely as it does give me a creative freedom that sometimes I cannot get with PMU so I will still be servicing my regular long time nail clients.

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

Being a salon owner is not for the weak. When people visit my salon i often get many compliments that its beautiful and what I wish people could see is all the hard work, late nights, sweat and tears that were put into making my salon what it is today. We only had about 1-2 months to completely gut the whole place from pulling out old tile flooring, to tearing down walls and put up walls elsewhere, plumbing, electrical work, new paint, new flooring put in, and so much more. Just when you think you’re almost to the finish line another thing comes up. Thanks to my hard working husband and our close friends and family we were able to finish on time for out grand opening. That’s not to say that one its done there wont be future issues that will arise but its all about the attitude you take when these things happen. I can either dwell on the problem or get out of my rut and do something to actually fix the problem. For example months after opening I’m thinking everything is running smoothly finally things are falling into place and I walk in one morning to see my ceiling had completely fallen with water leaking all over the place. On my new beds, all over my supplies, lights, etc. Yes, I definitely had a good cry, proceeded to call my mom and my husband. Sat there and stared at the mess and started to cleanup. We had a 24/hour event 2 days from this and we worked all day and night to be able to fix up everything in time for our event. I could have gave up and canceled the event but I consider myself to be a woman of my word and i felt like I couldn’t not cancel so as always my husband and i did everything to make it happen. Things like these can happen at any time, you just need to be mentally prepared for whatever life throws at you and always with a positive attitude.

Contact Info:

• Website: Sheyscouturebeautique.as.me
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/sheys_couture?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
• Facebook: Https://facebook.com/sheyscouture
• Other: https://g.co/kgs/t4Hs4s

Image Credits
Glenda Mendez Photography