Kennifer Marius has gone through a transformation – not personally, but professionally.
Along with taking her Reflections Mobile Spa on the road, she has landed her own space where her spa is now housed at the Barbados Golf Club.
“I went to the wedding show in December and everyone that I worked on while I was there wanted to know where I was located so that they could come,” Kennifer said.
“Some of the women were saying we have kids and we want to leave home. I thought about it as well and I realised I was keeping everything at my house and it was really infringing on my space. So I started looking around for space and I was going to go to the Savannah Hotel at first and I was driving past the Barbados Golf Club and saw a sign on the road “space for rent” and I came and checked it out.
Kennifer, a former Miss Barbados World and mum of a five-year-old girl knows how it is to work hard and need that feeling of being pampered.
For Kennifer it was a matter of timing, location and opportunity working together. After she saw the space she knew that it would be the perfect home for Reflections Spa.
“It took about three or four months to get some funding from Fund Access because they support small business owners,” she said. “This was a conference room, but I transformed it into what you see here. Everything from the tiling to building a shower, putting up partitions, Kennifer did or oversaw. The design was my own.”
Putting her personal touches on the space came easy to Kennifer who infused a lot of her personal touches into it.
“I like teal and I was trying to figure out how to blend the colours that I truly like without it screaming too loud. People were into the creams and beiges for spas but I wanted black, white and blue.”
Members of Kennifer’s family came to her aid in terms of custom-building furniture.
“We had a good time putting it together,” she said. “My family came in and helped with tiling. It was fun but hard work which took over four months.”
This change represented a new chapter in Kennifer’s business life and approach.
“After leaving the hotel and doing it on my own going mobile I had made all the connections from other hotels,” she revealed. “I still have that market where I go to people, but now people have a choice of coming here or me going to them.”
While Kennifer has transformed the space at Barbados Golf Club to suit her personal and professional taste, on many levels she too has gone through her own transformation.
“When I first thought about I knew that I had to have an addition to me for clients to come the treatments offered. But in the last year it has showed me loyalty,” she said. “It showed me how I am loyal to my clients and my clients are loyal to me. People don’t have to do spa services but when they leave here they feel so good.
“It was hard in the beginning because I was now getting off my feet. There was no huge amount of capital in your hand to take care of you for four months,” she said. “So it was a constant push. But I always have to keep going.”
Part of that push has been utilising social media, creating specials to attract clients and remain competitive in light of the recession. But Kennifer seems to be rising to the challenge.
“Being your own boss has its days. The first seven months of being here it was hard, but now it’s getting there because I’m not only here, I’m on the road. We can’t abandon the mobile spa because that’s our life too.”
