Tony Tjan, CEO and Managing Partner of MiniLuxe, Cue Ball, speaks onstage at The Tory Burch Foundation 2018 Embrace Ambition Summit in New York City. (Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images for Tory Burch Foundation)
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but sometimes it’s also in the eye of the entrepreneur. Starting a beauty company that helps its customers look good while also doing good doesn’t happen every day. In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we want to share the story of one locally based company that is using its position in the industry to empower immigrants.
Innovative nail salon chain MiniLuxe (https://miniluxe.com) has 23 stores and 500 employees, and is on track to achieve record revenue in 2024. We opened our first store in . His CEO of the company is Tony Chan, who was born in Newfoundland, where his Chinese family immigrated to Canada in the 1960s following persecution in Indonesia.
If you’re familiar with MiniLuxe, you already know one of the things that makes this salon so special. That’s because each store is extremely clean and chic. Treatment instruments are sterilized right in front of the customer, foreign substances are removed using ultrasound, and similarly clean products are used and sold. “There are many highly toxic products on the market that contain carcinogens,” he says Tjan. “We wanted to use science and health to bring a level of hygiene and cleanliness to the industry.”
When Tian, a Harvard Business School graduate, and fellow entrepreneurs founded Minilux, “we decided to think about how we could use capitalism as a force for good,” he says. “We joke that we were the only venture capital group that started out as a nail salon, but we wanted to show that purpose and profit can be mutually reinforcing allies.”
That’s evident in the company’s employee-first practices: “About 95% of our team are people of color and women,” he said, noting the industry’s notoriously exploitative history of unsafe working conditions. By prioritizing medical-grade hygiene standards, fair wages ($26.50 an hour + stock for workers), and free, market-responsive training, MiniLuxe now has an 84% employee retention rate, an average employee tenure of five years, and has just rolled out a new franchise model.
For Chan, looking at the other side of history is a big part of reversing the history of exploitation within the industry. “In the mid-1970s, about 20 immigrant refugee women learned the art of manicure,” he explains. “It became a path to entrepreneurship and democratized the industry.” That’s why the modern manicure became so popular. “In the United States, the highest hourly wage for Asian workers is in nail work,” he says. “I believe this is the least regulated beauty service. We need to do better consumer education, including a shared sense of respect. And when it comes to Mini Luxe, these You’re helping to enrich people’s lives.”
In addition to fair wages, the company offers employees stock options and health care, including vision and dental. “We are also proud to work in a place where they can express their creativity,” says Tian.
To that end, MiniLuxe thinks of nails as tiny canvases. “From colors to shapes, press-ons to intricate nail art, nail art has exploded in the last few years,” says Tian. MiniLuxe also acquired cult press-on brand Paint Box (https://paint-box.com) in 2021. “We encourage our team members and clients to be creative and always truly express themselves,” he says. “And sometimes those end up being true masterpieces.”
