Idea Watch: Attacking acne on a budget
I was one of those teenagers who had really bad acne growing up, and I tried everything to clear my skin up.
I even swore off chocolate and Kalamata olives for 2 years but it really didn’t make much of a difference.
When I hit my twenties a friend of mine treated me to a facial for my birthday and I was in shock how much it helped my skin problem. I vowed to get lots of facials so I to could become one of the lucky clear-skinned humans. That is until I found out how much my really nice friend ponyed up for the facial.
It was nearly $100 for a half-hour treatment at some fancy schmancy Manhattan salon. Being a poor journalist at the time, I figured it would be the last time I’d make it to a facial spa.
But what if there were drop-in facial shops that offered cut rates on facials? (Look at all the cheap manicures you can get on almost every street corner today.)
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Sherryl Ford, the founder and CEO of
Facelogic, did just that and now runs a franchise operation of spas that only offer facials, and do it for under $50 for a 50 minute treatment.
It came to her one night.
In 2005, she owned a day spa and two
Curves fitness franchises and realized lots of her spa customers were not coming on a regular basis for facials even though they loved them because they just couldn’t afford the luxury.
She was charging between $70 and $125 at the time for a facial. So one night, around 2 a.m., she woke up and wrote her idea for inexpensive facials on a four-by-six inch piece of paper.
“It was a missed market in the beauty industry,” Ford says.
She approached
Gary Findley, the retired president of Curves, who lived in Waco, with her idea, and he loved it and signed on to handle the sales for the new firm.
The first Facelogic opened in May 2005 in Waco.
She, along with two partners, now have 40 franchise locations with 60 additional under development across the country, although now there are mostly concentrated in California and Texas.
Her first store on the East Coast opened this month in Morristown, N.J.
When she started out she figured she’d hire
estheticians right out of school to keep her costs down, but it turned out there’s such a glut of people who specialize in facials out there the shops typically hire individuals with two to five years of experience.
Sales for 2007 hit $2.4 million and she projects to bring in nearly $4.5 million this year, and have 1000 locations by 2014.
Quite a feat for one of those supreme beings who never had an acne problem.
