Meet The Owners: Salon Prive'

wants its clients to be cared for from start to finish.

LeeAnn Jameson and Aiyanna Beausoleil worked together at a local salon, and decided it was about time they opened up their own. So in 2007 they opened a small studio on Ponemah Road that specialized in skin, nails and hair services.

It was just the two of them, but in less than a year the salon/spa began to hire more employees. They expanded into a larger space in their building after a vacancy appeared in 2010.

Salon Prive’ now has five employees offering a full-range of skin, nail, tanning, hair and beauty services. They are also developing their own all natural beauty product line along with their selection of environmentally-friendly products.

Amherst Patch sat down with Jameson and Beausoleil to talk about their business.

Patch: What is the best part of owning your own hair salon and spa?

Jameson: I think the best part is being able to have an idea and a vision of how we want the salon to be , and how we want our customers to feel when they come in. We get to have complete control over that. I enjoy it all and love what I do. I especially like not having to do it in somebody else’s parameters and ideas. It is a lot more work, blood, sweat and tears than just being an employee, but I am walking into my dream that I am creating every day.

Patch: What do you love about your work?

Beausoleil:  What got me into this job is that I get to make people feel good about themselves. That is my reward every single day and the look on their faces when we made them feel beautiful is priceless. It is something I’ve always like doing. I want to make them feel beautiful on the outside, but also the inside. My work has me literally touching them for a long period of time, and I wanted them to feel cared about.

Patch: How do you give back to the community?

Jameson: We donate our services to Bridges, which is a domestic and sexual violence support organization. Helping these women is the best for me, because some of them have never been touched in a loving way. They leave here saying that they have never felt so beautiful. Some of them are looking for a new job and haven’t been able to afford a haircut, or they are at a low point in their life; and a haircut is a welcome bit of normalcy. It is a healing experience for them and we can help them out in our own way. We want this to be a safe haven for everybody. Salon Prive’ stays closely tied to the community and we try and support local businesses and charities whenever possible.

Patch: What is challenging about owning your business

Jameson: We are so focused on our customers and pride ourselves on the attention we give them, it then gets hard to divide up time. We are doing the books, cleaning and answering phones, but luckily now have our employees help out. We have to manage our staff and the dynamics of their different personality in order to create a good working environment for everybody. We work very hard to keep the “chi” balanced in the salon.

Patch: What sets your salon/spa apart from the others?

Beausoleil: We are intently focused on the customer service aspect of the business. We want to make everybody feel welcome, pampered, loved and cared about. Our specialty is the small boutique; a small loving atmosphere in the salon. There are a lot of salons out there, but I feel we provide the most personal service.One person takes care of you the whole way, because you are with your service provider from the moment you walk in until the moment you leave. We also try to be environmentally responsible and offer products that are all natural and organic when possible.

Patch: How do you keep the workplace fun?

Jameson: We just keep a very loose, fun atmosphere here. We are constantly laughing and joking around; we want to keep it light because this is the beauty industry. We get together a lot as staff, and many of us are related here to make it a very family-oriented business. It can be stressful in this industry, but we always try and remember why we do this: to make people feel good. It is our job to blow off steam or any negative energy because it is so easy to transfer a bad mood to a client.

Visit their website here.