Elise Veal on Overcoming Challenges and Growing Elise Beauty Supply

Hello, my name is Elise Veal and I am the proud owner and founder at Elise Beauty Supply.

Oh, my daughters. My daughters were my inspiration. So I’ll give you a little bit of history. I am a graduate from Las Pesitas College in Livermore, California, class of 2009. During my business entrepreneurship studies, we had to do a project and the project involved a startup business.

I couldn’t figure out what do I want to do. I’m not sure what I would want to start up, but I noticed my children who were adults at the time, continuously visited the beauty supply store. If it wasn’t a few times during the week, it would be every other week. And I said, why do you need to keep going to get more hair, more hair, more styles, more styles, mom, we want to do more hairstyles. And so I thought to myself, hmm.

Okay, I don’t know much about the industry. I don’t know if there’s even any teachers out there, any mentors. So I ended up going to the grocery store, saw the red box and it had the documentary, Good Hair, featuring Chris Rock, the comedian. So from there I watched the video and I’m thinking to myself, I’m thinking about a statement Al Sharpton made, was, there’s not any presence of African -American women as owners in this industry. Somebody should consider, why not me? And I said, yeah, why not me? So that’s where my studies began. And so here I am.

My ideal target audience are women who are between the ages of 25 and 54 years of age. I find that these two segments, I say 25 to 34, and then the 35 to 54, they do have different needs. But what I learned over the years is that my younger group tend to prefer variety of colours whereas my second group which is the 35 to 54s tend to like to stay in the natural hair colour zone because you know they’re either in corporate America they’re running businesses or they just have conservative personalities and so I like the fact that we’re able to bounce between the two very easily.

Yes, elisebeautysupply.com. But we didn’t begin as an online presence. We started mobile. And it went from mobile to a location, from a location to the internet.

We’re 100 % online today. Thank you.

I believe what makes me different than my competitors is not only my presence, but the offerings that we have for our customers. We tend to develop a more emotional connection with them. So, and this started back when we had the brick and mortar. So we originally started our location base at 214 G street in the city of Antioch, California. We found that just personalities connecting.

People tended to stay a little bit longer instead of your usual purchase and go. They spent time with us and they shared life stories, some challenges and things that they’ve overcome. I never turned anyone away. So we just started building the rapport from hair to lifestyle and just different challenges, both male and female. So I didn’t think that that should end when we became an online presence. So what I do is I send out emails to stay in touch with the face, as well as first time customers having their 10 % off, as well as returning customers getting a variety of different discounts and gifts for purchases. Thank you.

The future plan is another brick and mortar. Yes, so we are 100 % online. Don’t have all the details just yet, but we are planning to re-establish ourselves in a storefront in the future.

So far online, I would say Google, Pinterest, and now TikTok.

Yes.
Ooh, I’ll tell you really quick, a huge challenge I faced was going from a storefront to online and not realising you’re restructuring your whole brand. Everybody, people are used to coming into your store, looking around, talking, buying. I had to learn the online language and I would have to say SEO was my biggest challenge.

But I overcame that by learning, well, what is SEO? Search Engine Optimization. What does it entail? What do I need to do to get my site optimised? So I would say the organic search has been one of my greatest successes. I don’t think that’s it. I just say for right now, because we’re always growing, but I had to take out the time and learn the different elements of search engine optimization. So that was definitely a challenge for me.

Yes, and I will tell you especially when you’re having to resize photos because you learn that your image is too big. Yes. You’re like what’s a what’s your LCP? What’s the largest content? I forgot what the P symbolises.

But anyway, I had some images that were like 900 pixels and Google’s like no you need like 250 by 250.

You know what I would say? What I didn’t do in the beginning was, you know, really do and like take and do an analysis on yourself because yes, you can put together a brand, you can put together your business plan and all the other things that you want to do, but you are going to be, you know, in control of that ship. So what, where are you at?

on a personal note, like are you in a place where you can handle stress? Do you know how to effectively manage customers and all their different personalities and moods? Sometimes people aren’t, they may be not be going through the best of times in their personal life, but It’s gonna come out, you’re gonna experience some of that So you have to take inventory of yourself and know what kind of stress can I handle? Am I good at managing? People without taking a personal and also learning as much about business as possible learning First about you, you know your credit business credit how to build it how to attain it how to manage it on the value that it brings to your company.

And also knowing how much money you’ll need. Gathering as much data as possible, interviewing small owners, that’s another good way to do it as well. But I would just say really just kind of start with yourself first and know, understand what your purpose is because your purpose is going to drive you when everything is going wrong, it’s going to stabilise you when the days are not so pleasant because sales is like a roller coaster at times. And so you can’t get discouraged. So you most definitely wanna strengthen your personality, your strengths, work on your endurance and you’ll be successful.

Thank you.

Yes, so I would say right now we’re selling the most our braiding hair and crochet hair that is doing the bestest right now. We started off just selling hair extensions. So that’s really funny because our biggest seller was hair extensions. That was like all we sold in the beginning. And then after we got into the brick and mortar. We started adding braiding hair, and then next thing you know, synthetic wigs. So everything started pretty slow in the addition of it. But I would say today, it is the braiding hair. And it’s so weird, because first it was the hair extensions, the human hair bundles, and now it’s the braiding hair and crochet hair.

Yes we do. We have some new brands that we’re gonna be introducing to our product mix that is coming in the new year and I’m excited about that because a lot of women and men are. They like certain brands and I will give you one of the brands, Bobby Boss. That is one of the new brands that customers will be able to get from us starting next year.

You know, well, let’s see. What I want them to know is that we value our customers. Our customers are a huge part of our business. And just know that whenever you shop at Elise Beauty Supply, not only is your order going to go off the same day it was purchased, you will get a gift with purchase. And also 10 % off on your first order. All orders that are over $50 receive free shipping and our loyal customers who have shopped with us at least four times always receive special discounts and gifts.

Thank you. I appreciate you as well. Thank you for having me as a guest.