Isabel Fisher spent her career inside one of America's established professional nail manufacturers. She is now Global Chief Executive Officer of LNC Professional, a brand that began in a Georgetown salon mixing its own shades by hand because nothing on the shelf matched its clients.
Episode: How a Georgetown salon that mixed its own colours ended up with a global nail brand, and a chief executive from one of America's established manufacturers.
Guests: Lexann McPhoy, Chief Executive Officer of LNC Professional (Guyana) and global Chief Brand Officer. Isabel Fisher, Global Chief Executive Officer, LNC Professional.
HOST: Welcome back. Today, a brand that started with a problem at a nail desk. Lexann McPhoy runs LNC Professional in Guyana and is the brand's global Chief Brand Officer. Isabel Fisher has just been appointed Global Chief Executive Officer, and comes from Nail Systems International, where she was Chief Operating Officer. Lexann, before there was a brand, you were running a salon. What was going wrong?
LEXANN McPHOY: Nothing dramatic. People expect some big failure. It was a small problem that happened every day. A client sat down, I looked at the ranges I had bought, and none of them were her. So we mixed. Two or three products blended until we reached the colour that suited the hand in front of us. Appointment after appointment.
HOST: What does that cost? People hear mixing colours and think, that sounds like craft.
LEXANN McPHOY: It is craft, and that is why it hides. Time you are not paid for, because she booked a set, not a chemistry session. Product, because you use more than one bottle to reach one colour. And you cannot repeat it exactly. She comes back in three weeks and you are trying to remember what you did. She does not know you mixed it. She only knows it looked different this time.
HOST: Isabel, you have spent your career on the manufacturing side. What do you hear in that?
ISABEL FISHER: A range that was not built for her clients. That is the normal condition of the category for much of the world. Ranges get built for the markets measured first, and everyone else improvises.
HOST: And improvising gets treated as skill.
ISABEL FISHER: It gets praised as skill, which is how it stays unsolved. If the technician can get there by blending, nobody upstream has to fix anything.
HOST: Lexann, when does mixing in a salon become a product range?
LEXANN McPHOY: When you realise you have been doing formulation work for years and calling it a Tuesday. We knew the gaps because we had been filling them by hand.
HOST: You opened with twenty six shades. Why that many?
LEXANN McPHOY: A smaller number recreates the problem. Open with eight and you are telling most of the world to keep mixing.
ISABEL FISHER: And twenty six is much harder than eight. Every shade is inventory, forecasting, production runs, shelf space. The easy version of this business is a narrow range and a big marketing budget. You only open broad if you believe the breadth is the product.
HOST: There is a safety story here too.
LEXANN McPHOY: The exclusions are printed on the bottle. Every product in our launched gel liquid range says HEMA free and TPO free on the label, and MMA free applies across the brand.
HOST: Why does the front of the bottle matter?
LEXANN McPHOY: Because of who is exposed. The client comes in once a month. The technician is in it all day, for years. HEMA is one of the most common causes of allergy in this trade, and she carries the exposure. She should not have to hunt on the back of a bottle to find out what she is handling.
HOST: And the range was built in Georgetown.
LEXANN McPHOY: Worked in heat and humidity from the first day, not developed somewhere temperate and shipped out to see how it copes. Most nail technicians in the world work in that climate. Very few professional ranges are designed in it.
HOST: Isabel, the obvious question. Why this?
ISABEL FISHER: You can usually tell within one conversation whether a brand was built by people who have stood at a nail desk or by people who have read about one. This one was built by people solving their own problem first. That produces different decisions. Twenty six shades. Exclusions printed where the technician will actually see them.
HOST: You have three women leading, on three continents.
LEXANN McPHOY: We went to the people who already knew the work. I run Latin America and the Caribbean from Georgetown, Isabel leads globally, and Darlene Tewitz handles training and product testing from Canada as a Purple Platinum Educator.
HOST: There is software too, which is unusual for a manufacturer.
LEXANN McPHOY: Because the product on the table is one of the things that can go wrong in a day. The appointment has to get booked, the deposit has to be collectable, and all of it has to work when the internet does not, which in many markets is a normal Tuesday. LNC Pro Suite works with or without a connection, and the salon keeps its own payment platform.
HOST: And a new shade is coming.
LEXANN McPHOY: Bare Rose, in the Rubber Base range. An opaque, warm, rosy pink. Most nudes grey out on deeper skin tones. This one holds its colour.
HOST: No date?
LEXANN McPHOY: Coming soon. I would rather say nothing than say a date I have to move.
HOST: Last question to each of you. What should be true in a year that is not true today?
ISABEL FISHER: That a technician anywhere in our markets reaches the shade she needs out of one bottle, and gets it again at the next appointment, without thinking about it. It should just work, for everyone.
LEXANN McPHOY: That somewhere a young technician never learns to mix shades by hand, because she never has to. I am proud of that skill. I would rather she did not need it.
HOST: Lexann McPhoy, Isabel Fisher, thank you both. The range is at lncpronails.com, the salon software at lncprosuite.com, and La Caribeña News covered the full launch story, linked in the show notes. LNC Professional City: Georgetown Address: 64 Hadfield Street Website: https://www.lncpronails.com Phone: +1 562 548 7272 Email: info@lncpronails.com