Tony Tjan: Co-Founder & CEO of MiniLuxe

Episode 651

On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we’re joined by Tony Tjan, Co-Founder and CEO of MiniLuxe, the groundbreaking clean beauty brand that’s redefining the nail care industry. Tony isn’t just building another salon business—he’s transforming an entire industry by prioritizing hygiene, ethical business practices, and an employee-first model that empowers beauty professionals.
During our conversation, Tony shares the journey behind MiniLuxe, from identifying a massive gap in the market to scaling a brand that’s setting new industry standards. We dive into the challenges of disrupting a traditionally fragmented space, how MiniLuxe is leveraging data and technology to enhance customer experience, and why putting nail designers first is a game-changer for the beauty industry. Tony also discusses MiniLuxe’s expansion plans, including a franchise model and a growing line of clean beauty products.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a beauty industry insider, or just someone who loves mission-driven brands, this episode is full of insights on leadership, scaling a business with integrity, and turning purpose into profit. Tune in to hear Tony’s story and what’s next for MiniLuxe. Now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Super, super excited to have our next guest here, true innovator and entrepreneur Tony Tjan, who is the co founder and CEO of MiniLuxe, a brand that’s completely redefining the nail industry with a commitment to clean, ethical beauty and an employee first model. He’s also the Chairman and Managing Partner of cue ball, an investment firm focused on long term, purpose driven businesses. But today we’re going to really, really dive into MiniLuxe and what they’re doing in the nail industry that is very, very different, and I cannot wait to hear more about this company, as well as Tony’s journey. So welcome Tony. How are you? I’m great. Thanks, Kara for having me. Super excited to hear more about everything that you’re doing at MiniLuxe. So can you give me the 32nd version or so of what is MiniLuxe? And why does it matter? Well,

Tony Tjan 1:51
the less than 30 second version is that we’re doing a combination trying to Starbuck the nail salon and Uber eyes it. So that’s the very, very short version, and ultimately lead to a place where we could build an LVMH of self care. I think why it matters is really grounded in the purpose by which myself and my founding team started this business. Is that we’re trying to empower and enrich lives everywhere through the power of self care and self expression.

Kara Goldin 2:17
I love that. So the nail industry isn’t exactly known for innovation, right? Maybe colors and maybe here and there. We hear some different ways of doing nails. But what made you see an opportunity where others didn’t,

Tony Tjan 2:35
well, my background is my family are overseas, Chinese Indonesian that grew up during a time of the Chinese genocide in Indonesia and had to come over on a very long, circuitous route into Canada, of all places, Newfoundland, Canada, the furthest point east where the sun first kisses the edge of North America every morning. So an island natural resource area. And the rejoinder to your question is that at age 15, i i left Island to go to the so called mainland in Toronto, and I started selling skin care door to door, and that became my first taste of seeing how entrepreneurship more broadly, can really be a vehicle for independence, to be, as you would say, undaunted, and to really believe in yourself, and have people say, I believe in you and pursue an opportunity, regardless of your circumstance or opportunity. Prior to that, so many people, my extended family, were building businesses in the retail services side. And this is a classic immigrant journey story. And when you grow up around that context of seeing how people might be treated in the restaurant industry, laundry mats, and as I became much more familiar with the nail care industry. It is a horrific, horrific industry that is hard to believe that it can even exist in the 21st century. In 2015 Sarah mass linear of The New York Times, did this expo say two days, almost 20 plus pages that talked about everything from human trafficking to the toxicity, and we just saw an opportunity to clean it up. And I’m not sure other people haven’t seen those types of opportunities. You know, maybe, maybe others saw the opportunity to also, do, you know, be one of the first people to reinvent, reinvent water before you but you got to do it. You got to do it. You got to jump in. So, you know, that’s, that’s a large part of it. And I think the other thing in our industry that it on the funding side, that’s dominated largely by a male capital investor base, and, you know, a white male investor base. You. It is not necessarily type of thing that people just Yes, oh my god, here’s an entrepreneur coming and talk about Manny’s and patties. Let’s go. Let’s put them in on the IC, you know, number one for Monday morning. So we took advantage of that fishing in ponds. Other people aren’t. So

Kara Goldin 5:16
you have a number I mean, you’re a services business as well as a products business. And can you talk a little bit about the services business and how that all came about? Yeah,

Tony Tjan 5:27
so on both sides, we wanted to really, really see where we can get 10x betterment. I think any entrepreneur that’s been out there starts with, you know what? What is my 10x betterment, especially around the product or service? In our case, it started with cleanliness and hygiene practices alongside ethical treatment of the workers. We were going to be 10x betterment, and that meant using a lot of my background and my co founders background that came out of biology, came out of chemistry to do autoclaving practices, to do ultrasonic debris removal, basically the instrumentation to be better and equally, later on, we thought about the reformalization of the chemistry of polishes. Most things that we interact with in this world are a science problem to solve. So we tried to just make those things better and so people could feel safe and trust coming in on the team side, we learned that about 30 to 40% of this industry is in what people would politely call the informal economy or gray market. But you know, people really needed to feel a sense of of safety, psychological and physical, and then be empowered in other ways. So we focused on those two things in our service and product, and that’s why I said it. On one side was starbucking nail salon, and that really meant elevating it on both the services and the product side. Little bit of Starbucks on one side. Estee Lauder on the other.

Kara Goldin 7:05
Love it. So how many salons Do you currently have in in the Los Angeles area? That’s basically where you started.

Tony Tjan 7:13
No, we started, actually in the greater Boston area, but we have, you know, close to about 25 across the country. We started to do our first franchise location. Just our first one launched at the end of the year. So that’s 24 plus one franchise JV partner, and in the Los Angeles area, we have two, one in Brentwood and one in Hollywood. And our hearts go up to all those that were impacted recently by the fires in LA

Kara Goldin 7:42
Yeah, definitely. I I’ve seen, I mentioned Los Angeles because I feel like I’ve seen more in Los Angeles. But maybe it’s just the two areas that

Tony Tjan 7:51
we like touching above our way we, we’ve we’ve spent very little on marketing. In fact, one of the lines my business partner, Matt’s leader house, and likes to say is, marketing is a tax for an unremarkable product. So we’ve managed to get the word of mouth out pretty good. I’d say, Over these years,

Kara Goldin 8:09
what surprised you about the real estate industry, I guess, the real estate and the service industry, as you’ve started to take your brand into those different cities, different locations across the country, are there some that have worked, some that haven’t worked? What’s really surprised you? Well,

Tony Tjan 8:29
well, the first thing that surprised me is the degree of structural bias and prejudice against this type of business that really hit on two fronts. One was a business that has certain stereotypical connotations around what people perceive to be a corner nail salon. And second, that it’s a women focused business, as you know all too well, such a small percentage of venture capital, under 3% goes to women owned, women focused businesses. It’s what inspired me to join Tory Burch is foundation to empower women entrepreneurs. But going back to your question, our very first location, you mentioned two dudes, myself and my business partner, John Hamill, and the Italian immigrant. Did have a third co founder there at the time, Jill Kravitz. But going into a fairly nice neighborhood and asking to just open a place, you would think that, if you can pay for it, we had done decently well with prior entrepreneur experiences. So, you know, I thought, Well, look, I’m just renting a space. How hard can it be pay the rent? And boy, they just did not want it. I mean, we had to put up hundreds of 1000s of dollars just as security and, you know, negotiate with everyone. And I think there’s just generally a bias against these types of businesses. Later on, what we’ve learned, there’s other business lessons, density matter. Course, a lot like building density. It’s almost counterintuitive. You think you want to spread out more between your locations, but I think density helps become a reinforcing amplification of traffic. And I would say just a last one, and then move on to next question. Is macroally, there’s been a shift in lifestyle centers, and certainly from malls to lifestyle centers, and seeing how service amenities and experiential retailing has become increasingly important as a traffic driver to a lot of the branded lifestyle centers, like like a grove in the LA area, or lifestyle centers that ws development run in the greater New England across the country,

Kara Goldin 10:41
one of the differentiators in your business model is you pay the nail designers more and train them in house and focus, really focus on their career growth. So why do you think the beauty industry has historically undervalued its workers and and how is this making really a difference in the industry?

Tony Tjan 11:03
Well, first, Kara, thank you for calling our team members nail designers, I think, as opposed to nail techs. And you know, I think we need to view these great artists, and they really are great artists as their own micro entrepreneurs, who often are coming from backgrounds that make them want to relentlessly pursue opportunity without regard to resources they have. I think why this area and other areas of the economy like it, have been mistreated? It’s it’s the structural reasons of ease of exploitation that happens in these populations, these population sets that tend to be people of color, oftentimes immigrants. So it becomes a easier targeting ground for the range of everything, again, from human trafficking to not necessarily following state regulations. It’s way, way under regulated, and a lot of it is cash driven. Now what we did is we decided that we would have everyone as a legal permanent visa. Legal visas, citizen working with us. And we do all do legitimate pay. I’m really proud. Since founding business, we’ve given out about, probably about 175 million in fair wages to nail designers across the country. And probably the metric I’m most proud of this year is that when you look and see what really defines an engaged culture is that we hit 87% year over year retention of our team members in an industry that is probably about 110% turnover. So we have about 10x betterment of keeping people and over half our team has been with us for over five years. In fact, tomorrow, we’re going to celebrate people that have been with us over 10 us over 10 years, and so that’s a really, really great feeling to have had people stay with us and build their journey with our own journey. That’s awesome.

Kara Goldin 13:12
So one of the things that you’ve done in building the company was you acquired a company called paintbox, and I’d love to hear a little bit more about that. And how did that all come about, and how did that fit into the bigger plan?

Tony Tjan 13:28
Well, I think nails are having a moment where nails are a new face. And if you think of a time when Estee Lauder bought a company Mac, it really celebrated a new generation of makeup artists and good products, and say, Look, you know, we’re having a new moment in face and skincare and makeup. At this moment, nails, which have been viewed as a very again, bottom of totem pole, lack of innovation, are really being elevated up to an artistry level. And you see that with museums such as MoMA putting in their permanent collection some designs of nails. So we made a bet a few years ago with the deep rooted belief that nail art and sophisticated nail art like that, I dressed up for Chinese New Year here. I don’t know if you could see it. I can see it. I love it. But you know, we, we really believe that that is going to be an elevation of nail care to almost. Nail says accessory. Nail says fashion accessory, whether custom painted on your nails or with very super highly elevated press ons to go on and off, like a piece of jewelry. Paint box had, in our view, been not just an innovator. Elle Langston had started this company after she was an editor at a beauty magazine, but equally, having a point of view of what constituted great modern nail art, and they had a great library of design. Had proven themselves on the fashion runways with many celebrities, so we really, really want to pick that up. And we’ve had a great ongoing relationship with Elle, the founder, and building that brand out. Now I

Kara Goldin 15:15
love that. So you obviously took your products that you’re using in the salons and built a business direct to consumer business, as well as selling that the products in the salons. But can you talk about the rollout strategy of those products as well and kind of what which product are you most proud of? Well,

Tony Tjan 15:39
we started by reformulating polishes, and in 2019 we had a, you know, maybe an OG influencer come, and we got that surprise call, and it was, well, you’re one of my favorite things. And that was Oprah. And we sold out the O effect is real, and that’s where we got her grounding, where her team called us the Tesla polishes that we had high performance, but equally could be clean. And this notion that you needed a trade off. What do people want when they get a Polish? They want that deep pigmentation. They want it to last, but equally, they want it clean. I mean, nail polish comes from a history of of effectively auto pain, and that’s horrific. You know, it’s so much of what goes into many of the Polish brands are carcinogenic or neuro endocrine disruptors. So we developed something that was clean, that lasted long, had great pigmentation. So that was the first tipping point. The product that we developed, that I’m probably most proud of, came with a more modern maybe influencer, Lily Collins, when and she’s, of course, a star of Emily in Paris. I’m of the generation, maybe knowing her dad more than I knew who she was, until my phone blew up that day and said, Oh my God. Have you seen this organic post? And she put out that our cuticle oil was one of the number one things she couldn’t live without, and that, of course, caused a great stir.

Kara Goldin 17:14
I’ve got it right here. Cuticle oil.

Tony Tjan 17:16
There you go. Oh, wow, yeah, there you go. Thank you for that blood Kara, but I call that chapstick for your nails, terrific. You know, just chapstick for your nails. And, you know, you get dry cuticles. This is something that is not just chapstick for your nails, but then we learn people were using it for everything from a mosquito bite or just like, you know, just to moisturize at certain parts. It’s just a natural base set of oils that is really like a super bombing product, and it’s become a real top number one best seller for us.

Kara Goldin 17:47
Well, it’s absolutely terrific. I love it so, and I love your polishes too, but the cuticle oil is really, really terrific, and

Tony Tjan 17:56
it’s got a great form factor too. You know, when EOS came out and came with a new form factor for lip balm. This too. It has a really nice roller ball that we just put on, so it was the form factor of the packaging, plus the actual ingredients in there, and EWC certified, so Environmental Working Group, EWG certified, sorry, which is really tough to do, meaning that we’re sustainable in Queens. I

Kara Goldin 18:19
love it. So most founders focus on their product or their service, and would love to really get great data, but you’ve actually leveraged the data in a way that I think is pretty rare in this industry. Can you talk a bit about that?

Tony Tjan 18:35
Well, a lot of us from our team, you mentioned beginning cue ball, like three of us together came from huge data businesses before. So I spent almost a decade working for one of my founding partners, who ran a company, Thompson that became Thomson Reuters, one of the world’s largest Information Service and data based businesses. So after we were able to purchase Reuters. I joked the logical thing to do was open up a nail salon. But that’s what we did. We tried to bring in great design, good business practices and data and now using elements of AI, the reason that’s so important because the nail business, like many businesses, is really about being predictive of matching supply and demand. So in that sense, when I go back to uberizing, it is no different than an Uber a Lyft a Canva, an Airbnb, where your goal has to be to optimize your utilization. You know when, when you have designers in your studios, is that when you have demand, think of an airline, you know, yield management on the seats. That’s the real problem you’re trying to solve. And sometimes I think entrepreneurs miss the boat of you know, you’re selling something to a consumer, but what makes you successful as a business is really understanding the. A critical problem you’re trying to solve, and data helps there. How does data help weather? Rainy Days, less people go out. Sunny days, more people go out. Geographies, LA, Texas, open tow season is much longer. Events, red carpet season, award season, a time of day, you know, morning, evening, day of the week, Friday, Saturday versus Monday. All those are in our modern vernacular, a learning set to build a learning model to actually create the inputs that will allow you to get outputs that can drive greater profitability. So we’re running at about 75 76% utilization. And having studios that have generated really, really high numbers on 1400 1500 square feet, as high as $2 million plus a studio

Kara Goldin 20:55
so interesting. So I was thinking, as you were saying, that when you mentioned weather, a lot of people think the company that I found at hint that when offices, for example, in the middle of winter, when nobody would be drinking water, especially on when you’ve got really bad weather patterns going on, whether it’s rain or snow or whatever, and it’s sort of the opposite is true, because People don’t go out, and so they end up staying inside. And so the numbers would actually spike in those areas, because people would choose not to go out and grab something to eat. And so it’s fascinating how you’re able to actually track that and see that in the data. So super, super interesting.

Tony Tjan 21:40
Yeah, I think there’s so many of those types of stories, Kara, like in your business water, that are not necessarily intuitive. And it comes from looking at the transactional data. Comes at looking at other types of input data you have, but also anthropological data, just observing how people behave. I remember speaking years ago to an author in retail, Paco Underhill, who told the story of how shopping carts ended up in the middle of a store, and it’s because people go in zipping past, because you’re going, I’m only going to buy, like, my milk. I just got to pick up one thing and Best Buy. And then they end up like, Oh, my God, they’re walking around with their arms in the store, and they can’t fit everything. And then someone came up with the idea of, like, oh, people actually need carts as much in the middle of the store and not the beginning. And we’ve seen a lot of patterns around that, such as, why do people come for their first manicure? Why would you think what’s the first manicure use case? What would be your guess? You

Kara Goldin 22:40
know, I feel like maybe parents or grandparents end up taking people there for the first time. I’m guessing

Tony Tjan 22:47
that’s one of the use cases of social bonding, social connectivity, mother, daughter, grandparents. We had a great Plato event with MiniLuxe, and grandparents were bringing all their kids in. It’s one of the top three first time use cases. But, you know, way up there was the time when someone has a high need, such as a first such as a job interview, and that was really interesting to me. And that insight came by sitting in the stores when I watched a client, she started breaking down, and she was crying, and I was really worried we had done something wrong. I went up and I said, I’m sorry. Is everything okay? Do you need a minute? And she said, You don’t understand. I said, please share. I was so worried again something happened. And she goes, this is my first manicure. And I said, Oh, okay. And she goes, I’m a single mom, and I have a job interview that’s critical today, and for 20 something dollars, I’m able to come in and just get a little boost of self confidence that is going to help me, and that just really made me understand that we were something much more than a trivial moment of beauty, that self care can offer, self confidence, self respect and one’s own self expression. That’s

Kara Goldin 24:15
a great story. What’s been the hardest decision you’ve had to make as a CEO, and what did you learn from it? Well,

Tony Tjan 24:23
the toughest decisions are always around people, and I think CEOs have really only a handful of things to do. They have to think about their people, allocating time and allocating capital. It comes down to those elements and people, decisions are really hard. I’ve written a little bit about this because I think we generally tend to have a cognitive bias and over index on competency versus character. And when you are building a business, you definitely need that skill, but you need. Heck of a lot of will. And, you know, we can have a long podcast session on all the professional investors, all the people that come in, and everything is, you know, you have a lot of spreadsheets, you have a lot of skills. People check the boxes of competency, but we forget that so much of this comes from something deeper around the character. And character is revealed over time, but people make people decisions in such snap moments of an interview where competency is rehearsed. So people rehearse for competency in terms of a pitch. To you in terms of an interview, you know, what’s your greatest weakness? Kara, some people would say that I work too hard, you know. Oh, what else you know? I’m a I’m a perfectionist. Anything else? Well, sometimes I’ve been told I’m too nice. You know, it’s one of three answers, you know, you don’t really Yeah, you know, but character, are these people going to be with you during the good and bad times? Are they going to have the will? Are they going to have that entrepreneurial temperament for the long struggle? Yeah,

Kara Goldin 26:14
that, and it’s tough, it’s tough to find, to find that. So for sure, I also think that a lot of what you talked about too, really leads to if you’re leading a group of people and they don’t think that they’re cared about, that doesn’t mean you need to be a father figure to them or a mother figure, but if you just don’t really have empathy towards them and sort of what they’re having to go through or and again, it’s, it’s a, it’s hard to explain it. It’s easier for a team to really show or feel it. I guess is, is the number one point. But I think it’s a, if you have that in a team, you’re going to get a lot more out of it than if you don’t right, and I think that that’s really what separates the great leaders from the not so great leaders. Because if they don’t, if that team doesn’t think that you care about them, they’re not going to deliver, they’re they’re going to clock punch right, they’re going to do whatever they have to do. But they’re, you know, not really ultimately going to be caring or loyal to your company at all. Yeah,

Tony Tjan 27:27
you said that. Well, I tried to think about that from three levels. One, it has to start with level of truth. Truth builds trust, so But truth is also about what Jim Collins talked about, of just having a level of humility in your listening, so that you get productive discourse, versus just discourse. And it also means integrity in your actions, connecting your say and do you know, connect your say to your due. Your say should be what you think. Your think should be what you feel. And how you feel is who you are. So people get to trust that you’re have a consistency, a self congruence. And then if you have a baseline of truth, you can move to a level of kindness and generosity, because the two are interlinked. You need to have that foundation, and then you can get to empathy and kindness you talked about. And ultimately, where people get really engaged is when you are viewing them, not just for the role they can play in your company and business, but you are helping them have a level of wholeness in who they are, so that they’re motivated not just by the extrinsic components of title and money, but a sense of growth development inside your company. But you’re saying, you know, let me know what’s really important to you. Kara, what are you trying to do in life? How does this connect to those bigger goals, but that level of self actualization you never get there if you’re not doing the first two things, truth and kindness.

Kara Goldin 29:05
Totally agree. So Tony, you’re an incredible example of great leadership, and you’re not just building a great brand, but you’re changing an industry. So thank you so much for joining us here today to talk a little bit more about MiniLuxe, everybody should check out MiniLuxe.com book a service, get your hands on their clean beauty products and follow on social as well. And if this episode gave you something to think about, subscribe, leave a great review and share it with someone who needs to know all about what Tony is doing and MiniLuxe as well. So see you next time on the Kara Goldin shows. Thank you so much Tony. Thank you Kara. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and of course, feel free to subscribe. So you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now. You.

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