The nail salon and nail care brand Miniluxe wants to turn its employees into “mani millionaires” through franchising.
Miniluxe has been around since 2008, but last year it introduced a new model to open more locations through franchising. Currently, the company has just over 20 locations in the U.S., but it plans to increase that number by thousands through franchising.
Its co-founder and CEO Tony Tjan joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and talked about the company’s ambitions.
“There is no other industry that employs as many craftsmen and craftswomen on an hourly basis as nail care, apart from household cleaning,” said Tjan. “That’s the why. The how is three Cs: we have to be clean, we have to celebrate craftsmanship and we have to be creative.”
The company has thus built its own system of nail salons that use its own products. It also boasts of paying its employees higher wages and offering them shares in the company. To grow the company even further, it hopes to use franchising to reach a new level of scale that Miniluxe has never seen before.
Here are some highlights from the conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
Trying to change the industry location by location
“I think we still have a long way to go. I think we’re still a relatively small drop in the ocean of nail care. When you consider that there are 65,000 nail salons and we have 23 of them and we’re starting to franchise – we can imagine that at Miniluxe we’ll have thousands in the next few years – it’s still a relatively small percentage. Nevertheless, raising awareness of the issues has certainly led to greater awareness.”
Why Miniluxe decided to produce its own products
“We also made the decision probably in year five to stop using any of the established nail polish brands and nail care services. And me and my partner finally took our biology and biochemistry degrees and worked with some of the best people anywhere – we had the privilege of working with some of the best people in the MIT labs – to try to develop and push forward formulas that are better and safer for you in the world of nail care.”
The thesis behind franchising
“It’s worth taking a step back and talking about: Why do people start franchises? First, it’s a capital efficient source, so people use less capital when they roll out franchises. And that’s usually what people default to – oh, they want to grow fast; they want to scale fast. And that’s part of it. But two other dimensions have been really, really important to us… we’ve always believed that our brand is a platform for empowerment. Our own nail technicians have a system where they can continue to gain economic and creative empowerment. But we encourage our own team members. We hope that over time, some of our best franchisees will come from our internal system. We already have half of our nail technicians – who people would more often call technicians, but we don’t like that term – owning shares in the company. And our first nail technicians and our first studio managers for us at Miniluxe have reached out and said they’re interested in a franchise. That would be a real dream because it helps us to realize our dream of franchising as a means of true empowerment faster. Our vision is to create the first Mani-millionaires, as we call them internally. The second reason why franchising is really important to us is to build a neural network of learning and innovation. Think of it as crowdsourcing.”
