Lightning in a Bottle: Two Women — the Founder and CEO — Team Up to Accelerate Growth
In 2006, after outgrowing her successful one-room business doing eyelash extensions, Anna Phillips opened her first full salon, The Lash Lounge, about a mile from her Colleyville, Texas location. Word spread quickly, and it wasn’t long before she had a month-long waiting list. Within a couple of years, she’d opened two more. “It was like catching lightning in a bottle,” she says.
“I had seen beauty trends come and go, but when I would perform a lash extension service there was just something about it, an immediate transformation, unlike any other service I could provide. It gave women a sense of confidence,” she says. “I’ve seen women open their eyes and start crying, seeing themselves as beautiful for the first time. I can’t explain it.”
By offering eyelash extensions as a single, exclusive service, elevating it from a supporting role at the back of the salon to the soloist at the front of the stage, Phillips has a legitimate claim on being the person who pioneered and popularized the concept of a dedicated eyelash extension salon in the U.S.
As the business grew, customers urged her to open more. In 2009, one of them connected her with a franchise consultant who helped her learn the ropes of franchising, create an FDD, and begin selling franchises.
From 2010 to the end of 2015, The Lash Lounge saw a steady growth of signings for new salons. “We were the first of our kind for a long time in franchising, the first in the country to create an exclusive destination for lashes, which meant growing the system fast wasn’t urgent,” says Phillips. That changed around 2013 when serious competition appeared in the franchise space.
“We were still self-funding the whole franchise project and working through the hurdles as they came,” says Phillips. But with the newly arrived competition, and more on the horizon as the concept and service caught on, Phillips needed to move faster, she says — not only to keep her business viable, but also to assert The Lash Lounge’s reputation for exceptional quality and professionalism that she’d worked so hard to establish for the eyelash extension industry and The Lash Lounge specifically.
“I knew what my forte was. My strength was helping the owners, training the staff, and showing them how to navigate through owning a salon,” she says. “I knew I could open a successful Lash Lounge with a blindfold on, but the scale and scope of franchising was a whole new animal.” So was opening more and more salons.
To head off the competition and accelerate the growth of her business — while maintaining the high standards she’d developed — Phillips needed to find the right partner, not only for financial support but also for the expertise and hands-on experience required to grow a franchise system.
“Companies were coming out of the woodwork to court me to become a partner,” she says. “Until I met Franworth and John Rotche there wasn’t a company that was the right fit, culture, and alignment.” That was in early 2016. By spring they’d become partners.
“We spent the rest of that year fine-tuning and tightening up what The Lash Lounge offered,” says Phillips. “For example, in the early salons we had a small retail boutique, and while it added some nice flair it wasn’t scalable and took the focus away from our expertise: the core service of eyelash extensions.”
The next two years, says Phillips, “were a wild ride. We sold close to 400 licenses in 2 years. I think I lost count at 320.”
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