Friday, March 29, 2024

My salon job gives me Sh. 30,000 per month

Joseph Mwangi’s childhood dream was to join the medical world. But, along the way he chanced upon a totally different career path and he has never looked back.

He is now  a  beautician and he is passionate about his work, which he says has some similarities to the medical career he once coveted.  “I  still handle health matters. I take care of our ladies’ hair and ensure it is healthy and smart all the time,” he says.

He bumped into his present career during a visit to his childhood friend in Nakuru.

Mr Mwangi  lived in Nyeri. When he  sat  his last Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education paper,  he visited  the friend in Nakuru for a day.

Mr Mwangi hardly believed that his friend was earning a living as a mobile beautician. He was moving from house to house in search of clients.

“I knew my parents would not want to see me touching a women’s hair,” he says.

Nonetheless, he helped his friend to perform  minor beauty chores from the first day of the visit. And he never went back to Nyeri for several weeks. He started working with his friend and was able to earn a stipend.

Soon his interest in the business took root and he started to save to launch his own venture.  “Along the way, some ladies preferred me to apply nail polish thanks to my good work,” he says.

“I saved Sh18,000 which I used to buy plastic chairs, a stand-alone bathing basin and a few lotions, nail polish and hair chemicals.”

He rented a stall in Nakuru but making ends meet was not easy. Competition was stiff as Nakuru has many beauticians. He decided to train young people on the job to supplement his income.

He started by taking in six interns some of whom would later become his employees.

Two years down the road, his business had expanded and the small room he was operating from could not accommodate the streams of customers looking for his services. Another challenge was that he had not grasped emerging trends in the world of beauty.

LEARNED FROM THE INTERNET

“I lacked expertise in the new fields and I turned to the internet to learn about new ways of enhancing a woman’s beauty,” Mr Mwangi recalled.

Now he makes between Sh20,000 and Sh30,000 monthly after taking care of all expenses including paying his 10 employees.

Mr Mwangi has now rented bigger premises where he has set up a barber shop for men. He offers  massage and facial cleansing services.

“In a day, we are able to attend to between 60 and 101 clients who are mostly women,” he said adding that seven of his ten employees are men.

Some of the services offered in his beauty centre include manicure, pedicure, massage facial and feet scrubbing.

“I discovered that Nakuru women prefer services offered by men,” he says.

Mwangi’s dream is to set up a modern parlour in the next one year.

He said like any other business, beauty business has its own challenges which include low seasons.

“The lowest ebb comes during the rainy season as most women prefer to knit their hair and put on closed shoe where the toes are hardly exposed,” he says.

“This is very bad for our business but we keep going by offering internship to young people seeking to learn the trade at a fee.”

Mwangi said he also trains hairstylists seeking to improve their skills.

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