At Crown + Beauty Salon in Oakville, Ontario in Canada Megan Ferreira and Vanessa Carter are committed to making you feel and look your best. They offer an array of treatments, creative color concepts, classic and cutting-edge cuts, spa services including Micro Blading & Ombre Shading, Lash extensions & Lash lifts and tinting, to meet your needs. The stylists and aestheticians at Crown and Beauty have years of experience and have been trained around the country, ensuring that you will find exactly what you need with us. Whether you are coming in for a new look, a brow or lash consultation, or just need some TLC for your locks, you can find it at Crown and Beauty Salon.
Success can be achieved through revenue, the number of products sold, the prominence of certain businesses, reach, and so much more. How we define it is subjective. In a sea of beauty salon entrepreneurs, readers often stumble across successful business founders who dove into unknown waters with the purpose of providing beauty services & products for customers that are in need of extra beauty treatment.
Both Megan Ferreira and Vanessa Carter have strong backgrounds in the salon and skincare industry. Crown & Beauty’s Skin Care and Hair Care product line specializes in Organic Essential based skincare, catering to the specific needs of the skin and a luxurious hair line producing quality shampoo and conditioners as well as nourishing hair treatments and other defining serums and products.
Megan & Vanessa
Megan Ferreira and Vanessa Carter are the proud owners of CROWN + BEAUTY. Behind the scenes of doing brows and hair as well as formulating/marketing their products, both are MOM’s! Momma’s first, and Boss Babes after. Both Megan and Vanessa have strong backgrounds in the salon and skincare industry.
WOT spoke with Megan & Vanessa about their experiences as an incredibly motivated, business-minded women.
Any tips for women to maintain healthy hair and skin?
Our hair and skin are very important to our physical appearance especially as we age.
SKIN:
Make sure you always (and we mean always) remove your makeup before hitting the sheets. The skin needs to breathe overnight. And makeup prevents that, as leaving it on overnight clogs the pores which may cause blemishes and/or blackheads, wrinkles and overall dull skin.
We suggest using our “Sea Complexion” moisturizer & Cleanser all in one, to remove excess makeup and moisturize the skin before bed. The benefits are endless, Rich in anti-inflammatory omega fatty acids, sea buckthorn can be helpful for problematic skin conditions like eczema, rosacea and acne; With a high oleic acid content, sea buckthorn is phenomenal for anti-aging dry and irritated skin. Our all-in-one product cares for a range of skin issues and works for all skin types- all the way from oily to normal to dry.
HAIR:
To keep strands hydrated and smooth we suggest using a moisturizing hair mask or deep conditioner at least once a week, and more frequently if you use hot tools regularly. Our favourite is our keratin based hair mask “To The Rescue” which will leave your hair feeling soft and shiny without weighing it down. And less heating tools! If you must use them you should always apply a heat protecting spray to your hair whenever using a curling iron or flat iron, we love our “Lust + Locks” heat protectant and de-tangler, our signature sea buckthorn oil blend not only nurtures your hair but also gives it irresistible shine while offering protection against heating tools.
Do you have any advice or any message for all the people out there that dream to start a business?
I guess the best advice we could give anyone looking to start a business is, JUST DO IT! There will always be a million reasons why you shouldn’t do it and a million people telling you why you can’t, but anything worth having will always take hard work. If you’re willing to build it, the rest will fall together.
What traits should one look for when they are looking for a business partner?
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. When you find your Ying to your Yang, you’ve pretty much hit the jackpot! Fortunately for us, we have complemented each other in many ways. Vanessa is very business mind-framed. Whereas Megan is very creative. When starting a journey it is imperative to tackle both of those sides. Aside from that, another valuable trait you need to look for in a business partner is communication. Communication is the most important key factor to success. Someone you could see yourself marrying – as funny as that sounds but your business partner is your work/business wife as you will spend just as much time together as your own husband or more. Make sure you like each other.
What have been some of your failures, and what have you learned from them?
We’ve had numerous failures during our climb to success. I don’t think you can get ahead without failing a few times or more, failures are the stepping stones toward success.
Our biggest fail we’ve had so far was messing up with our label “s”( a few times- LOL) We laugh now, but at the time when you have a large run and realized you spent all this money and messed up on your labels can really get you in a frenzy.
We now quadruple check our labels prior to printing each and every time!
Can you describe your customers?
Most of our customers are health conscious of what they buy for their hair and skin. They are the ones who research ingredients and looking for true results.
If you had an extra 6 hours in a day, what would you do?
I think we would both have to agree and say we would have a nap and maybe watch Netflix lol simple as that. We are always so busy between being moms to young ones, working in the salon, formulating and creating skin and hair care products as well as online social media content work.
If you could go back and tell yourself one thing before beginning your career what would it be?
Patience! The ladder to success is a never-ending one and there have been many times we would want to give up. Things don’t go as planned and they take so much longer than you first imagine. Patience is key.
How did you two get started in this business?
Both of us have loved hair and skincare beauty since we were kids. Vanessa has been involved in the hair industry for over 19 years and Megan has been in the skincare and makeup industry for over 23 years. We both have such a passion for beauty products and decided to start formulating our own products with the knowledge we accumulated being in the industry. We wanted to create a skincare line that was focused on natural organic essential oil-based skincare products that would help heal skin issues all the way from acne-to-rosacea-to-eczema. Our haircare was formulated by focusing on important factors that women needed to help treat and heal damaged hair as well as maintaining hair growth from blondes to brunettes to multi-colored hair.
How do you market your business? How are people aware of your business?
Launching a product line has to be one of the hardest things we have ever done. It’s all on YOU to make it. We are our social media content writers, we are our own photographers, we are our own advertisers and the list goes on. We are grateful for the fact that we are in the age of social media which does make it easier to advertise but there is also a tremendous amount of competition. But our number one advertising has been word of mouth and the reviews we get from so many buyers that love our products, which in itself is the most rewarding.
Why do your customers select you over your competitors?
Results! Most of our everyday beauty products are full of nasty synthetic chemicals that are doing more harm than good. Our skin is our biggest organ and absorbs around 60% of everything we put on it. This means these nasty chemicals are ending up in our bloodstream, whether it be through our skincare or hair care.
We developed our skincare line to help heal skin issues and not just bandaid the problem, which we found a lot of competing brands do. Our haircare is a sea buckthorn oil-based hairline, you can count on having lustrous, healthy and manageable hair while also encouraging healthy hair growth.