*sigh*
I hate to see…read moretalented people with poor business skills. It's the little, manageable, correctable things that crush them in the end. Working sporadic days/hours, not having a formal way to book an appointment (playing text tag and waiting days for her to check her schedule and get back to me with a date/time she's free is unacceptable)... that's the quickest way to lose a customer.
This is the era of SquareUp and similar apps.. I was going to recommend that she look into it, but during one of my appointments, another client beat me to it. Her reply was that she didn't want people to have that much access to her.
But....it's. your. job. Why wouldn't you want clients to have access to you? Block off the times that you are unavailable and let your customers choose from there. Simple. It's not like we're trying to come over and hang out at your house. We're trying to give you our money. What's the problem?
At one point, it took over 2 months to get an appointment. I tried to make an appointment before Thanksgiving and did not actually get it until the end of January. To be fair, she finally scheduled appointment for 6 weeks after my fill in, but got sick the morning of, and told me she would reschedule...but she never did.
She also has no color palette for customers to check out, so instead we have to play a guessing game of 'What color do you want?'. In the 17 years that I've been getting my nails done, I have always determined what color I want by looking at a color palette, and it would save us both so much time if I could make that decision while she's doing my nails as opposed to trying to figure it out when she's ready to polish. I recommended that she get one several times, but she just shrugged off my suggestions.
What's really frustrating about this whole process is that as great as my nails look after finally getting the appointment, the polish starts chipping within 48 hours. I'm not sure if it's because the polish is watered down, a problem with the UV lamp she uses, or maybe because she doesn't use base coat. I don't know. All I know is that rarely have I gone more than a week without my nails looking like I've had the polish for over a month. At one point, it was so bad that several of my nails were bare by the time I got to her for a repair. Not a fill-in: a repair in between fill-ins. The polish peeled off like the foil on a can of Pringles.
If it's that hard to get a fill appointment, imagine how much harder it is to get an appointment for polish change. Instead, I have to go to one of my neighborhood nail salons and pay another $20 to $30 for a polish change (and *gasp* those salons actually offered color palettes, so I can actually see the polish colors I want! Go figure!).
The last time she did my nails, one of them broke within the first 2 hours (and since I have evening appointments, there was no way I could go back and get it fixed because the salon was closed). The next day I had the chance to look at them in broad daylight and noticed that the acrylic was unusually thin, and that some of my nails did not have enough acrylic on the edges/corners (the sides of my natural nails were poking out from the underneath the acrylic.)
No doubt, the girl is talented, but the quality and consistency is not there, and she's just not serious about her business... and that's really a shame. I've been wearing stiletto nails for about 5 years now and she has definitely done some of the best work I've had, in terms of nail shaping. However the juice is no longer worth the squeeze. There are too many Asian-owned nail salons that also do really good work, and I'm no longer willing to exert the extra effort to support the business of someone who doesn't value my business or my money or time enough to provide quality and reasonably accessible services.
