Xtreme Lashes

Some businesses start with doodles on a napkin, others with dreams in a garage, and still others start in the family game room, which is precisely the case for extreme lashes by Joe Muselli. Connecting with stylists from around the world, her company has defined a new approach to enhancing natural beauty with semi permanent eyelash extensions. They provide not only the lashes, but the training needed to become a certified lash stylist. I caught up with Jo Marcelli and her head of operations to learn about their early challenges and see how they've used Salesforce to grow beautifully into a global business. From an idea created in a family home. You started this out of your own house in a game room. So can you talk more about that?

I worked at Texas Children's Hospital as a pediatric ICU nurse. So I asked the women around me if there was a product that would free you, liberate you from the hassles of mascara, would you use such a service? And overwhelmingly, all the women around me said they would definitely partake in this. Being that I was recently married, I'm a mother of four children, Brilliant kids. We sat down at the dinner table one day and I talked about, let's start this business together. And we set off from there.

Can you talk about your distribution network between stylists, your retail specialists, and then your franchises? So that would be great if you could go through that?

Sure. We have the business to business component, which are the beauty professionals that provide the service. We also provide service direct to consumer with our custom formulated retail products direct to consumer on our website. We also service beauty professionals and consumers worldwide by incorporating different distributors around the world, which we call franchisees.

How were you running your business prior to working with Salesforce?

When you go from a family business, working outside the house and growing so rapidly, you get to kind of build different systems and, you know, you build a system for your accounting, build a system for your warehouse, build a system for your customer support and service, build a system for your sales, have a different system for your marketing. So one of the first projects that Joe tasked me with when I showed up was Ali, we need a different CRM. What we're doing today is not going to be sustainable for a very long time. So we really wanted to have one place where we can store our data. And that was one of the important criteria. You know, having sales service products and inventory and quality control and shipping. The whole life cycle of the product is under one roof. I can go back and I can see, okay, who sold it, who shipped it, who assembled it, who bought it. Who quality controlled it. The whole lifecycle of the product is under one roof. And when it comes to analyzing data and what are the trends, what are the products we need to focus on? We just use Salesforce to achieve that. We were doing that before Salesforce, but just Salesforce enables to do it much better and much more scalable.

As we grow. Knowing that this is cloud based, I don't have to have my IT guys bring in everybody's laptops. Right now we have 20 trainers in the United States. But now we know that with the cloud, we give them a username and password, they access all this, they access everything. And knowing that we have the app exchange that we can go and find new tools and new software applications that are running on the same platform. That's amazing.

What advice do you have for entrepreneurs, and in particular female entrepreneurs?

Stay true to your vision and mission and set goals and continue to strive through those goals and take it on as a journey. Because life is a journey and your business is a journey, no matter how.

You look at it as a family story, a business story, a Salesforce story, a success story. That is a beautiful story. To learn more, Visit salesforce.com smallbusinesssolutions.