We recently connected with Zuri Sanaa and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Zuri, thanks for joining us today. Almost all entrepreneurs have had to decide whether to start now or later? There are always pros and cons for waiting and so we’d love to hear what you think about your decision in retrospect. If you could go back in time, would you have started your business sooner, later or at the exact time you started?
When it comes to starting my business like anybody else Id say I wish I started sooner. If Im being honest I started my business at a crazy time in life but it was actually the perfect time. Ive always wanted to be an esthetician since I can remember it was the skilled trade I planned to take on upon high school graduation. At the time I graduated that program did not offer financial aide so they expected someone who had never worked a job in their life at 17 years old to be able to pay for a now $13k program but at that time it might have been $8k. So, naturally like anybody else I took other routes in life and the last route I took on working a 9-5 was I did what everyone in my hometown does and I tried to be a factory worker for jeep because it was known to be a great paying job. Although it was a great paying job it wasn’t for me after working there for 2 years I decided to take a leave from work to take the esthetician program at Toledo Academy of Beauty.
The program took 8 months and the esthetic teacher is literally the best with a 100% pass rate for stateboards. Our entire class went to take stateboards around the same time and we all passed both written and pratical portions the first time with high scores! Upon graduation I did plan to keep my 9-5 job but it just didnt fit my path that I saw for my life so I went off on a limb and just quit my job and I started off working from my basement that I setup as an in home salon. This all occured around the time frame of the covid-19 pandemic and they allowed us for a short time to continue working from home even after they made salons close for business due to safety. This only lasted for a month or so before the board of cosmetology requested that we could no longer work in home based salons.
This made me have to figure out what I could do in the mean time as life still goes on and bills do not stop coming in because you dont have an income. I have always been a resourceful person with many talents that people dont know about. I looked at the things that we could no longer just get as easy like hand sanitizer and mask. I have never made either item before but i did my research and I am already a natural skincare product developer since 2016 so to produce sanizter that was easy It just never became a reason for me to make it. Now its one of my customers favorite products. We were “required” to wear mask so because there werent any stores able to locally get them in stock i got on “Youtube University” and grabbed an online partner and taught myself how to sew facbric masks. I was able to pay my bills throught out the pandemic even though my full time career was on pause.
My mother who is always my biggest supporter talked me into going in the direction of purchasing commerical propety because my business started to get to a level where i required more space and I didnt want the entire city of “Toledo” knowing where i lived nor coming to my house. So the space that I am currently in it was not the original building that I wanted to purchase many people dont even know that I actually hated it. (Lol) If you see what it looks like now vs what it looked like before I put my touch of decor into it. It is an entirely new space that just needed the right energy to occupy it. The direction that I would like to take my Salon today is Id like to hire and train NEW licensed professionals who arent in the position to owner their own spaces or they just dont want the responsibility for all the overhead cost that it takes to be a commerical real estate owner. I look forward to creating a team of outstanding women with ambition, great energy and willingness to change for the better and GROW.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
At my full service salon I offer a WIDE variety of products that I formulate with my own recipes from raw ingredients to correct, enhance or just make you smell amazing!!!
As an esthetic my service menu includes: luxury custom facials, full body waxing, yoni steams or vaginal steaming, body contouring, infrared sauna, full body massages etc.
As a product developer Im sure I have over 100 different products that I can make and offer but I will introduce the most popular ones based on customer reviews and ratings.
I make a cinnamon coffee scrub which I recommend my body contouring clients to use in-between services as it allows them to continue to receive the benefits of removing excess celulite .
Next we have our “lemon poundcake sugar scrub” a big crowd pleaser hands down best seller next to my whipped body butters that everyone loves its hard to keep them on the shelf once I make them they are bought and gone! But they smell exactly like they sound and the benefits you get within your skin in addition to how it makes you smell and feel is unmatched!
Last but certainly not lease I make a wide variety of fine fragrance roll on oils, body oils, and body sprays that lingerie so well you can be in a store and they have a pleasant but not annoyingly over powering linger about them but in my experience people will literally chase you out of the store to ask “what are you wearing I’ve been smelling you since aisle 5! lol Some scents that are very popular when it comes to those products would be:the lemon poundcake collection, the peal j collection (named after my grandmother who passed away), the baccarat 540 collection and the “Good Girls” collection which is NEW and smells nothing like the name brand good girls scent its like a mild sugar and spice and everything nice type of scent that could honestly go unisex in my opinion but I named it after the song by Joe-Good Girls because its my favorite song and the smell gives me the vibe that the girls he sang about would definitely wear it!
I look forward to my brand expanding more in my skincare line this year as Ive already given my products to a few celebrities just from going to concerts like Ambre who went to the BET awards this year, Philadelphia Freeway “he loves my beard oil and a few others!
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Funding my business? whew lets talk about it between refunds from going to school, servicing my clients, selling my products, doing 1099 gigs like InstaCart or Door Dash just to name a few ways that have contributed to fund my business. These have been the source of my businesses startup. The only thing that was funded from an investor was the purchase of building the bank gave me a nice loan amount to purchase it but outside of that without any third parties help I have funded my business of the plain and simple hustle of my many different skill sets.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
Books that inspired me and impacted my management and entrepreneurship thinking pattern would have to be the following: 1. Money Hacks By: Lisa Rowan
2. How to hustle and win By: Supreme Understanding
3.Multicultural skin treatments by Joelle Lee
Videos I cannot think of anyone specifically but a lot of tik Tok channels have inspired me with little tips and tricks to improve ways of doing business for me
Contact Info:
- Website: www.zurisanaabeautybar.com
- Instagram: zurisanaa.beautybar
- Facebook: Facebook.com/zurisanaabeautybar
Image Credits
Eric Mack (Image Credit)