At some point in the last 3-6 months, my wife and I looked at each other and asked the question: We already both have (more than) full-time jobs. What if we had…even more jobs? We both gave the wrong correct answer, and now we have our very own Vacation Nail Collective Shop.

Vacation Nail Collective, our salon, officially open back in July 2021, but my wife Rachel’s nail journey really started the early 2019. She had a semi-terrible corporate pro artist account management job at a big time make up company, but she had already started on her journey to become a licensed manicurist in the great State of California. At some point, her job went past “semi” into straight up “terrible”, and she quit the corpo life to do her nail school full-time.

Honestly, after walking in on her crying over her laptop one too many times, I told her that quitting her job was almost as much for my benefit as it was hers. We were in a financial position to be a (somewhat temporary) one-income household, so she finished up school and got her license. After a few months of doing nails out of an extra room of our house, she rented a salon suite and built up her client-base just in time to get shutdown for ~5 months because of COVID, doh.

After the world (kinda) opened up again, Rachel had enough clientele to open up a waitlist, then enough to fill the waitlist, and then even enough to close the waitlist (not fair to add people who have almost zero chance of getting an appointment). In Spring of 2021 we started to look for commercial space, and on August 1st 2021 we officially opened up Vacation Nail Collective in the Circle in City of Orange, California.

We now have 4 other independent artists who “booth rent” from us. In 2022 we built our an education room, and Rachel hosts certification sessions for nail brands and general continuing education for licensed manicurists.

However, 3 months ago, we decided we were ready to take the next step, and our E-Commerce journey began. We launched last week, and so far, so good. We got your glitters, we got your charms, we got your nail stickers, we got your flowers, we got your flake, we got your chrome.

We even got your sweet “Relax Your Hand” necklaces, but those immediately sold out. But don’t don’t worry, they’ll be back soon.

But, mostly, we got something my wife and I can do together, for ourselves. It’s just the start of the adventure, and hopefully one that leads the promised land that I like to call “paying ourselves at least minimum wage”, heh.