Pastel Paradise!

Recently, Creative Director Diablo Rose and I got together to create a photo shoot which had been a dream of ours for some time, the theme was 'Pastel Pin-up Perfection'. We excitedly got in touch with the winner of our Face of Le Keux 2015, Danielle, as well as some of the competition's runners up and some of our previous customers to model for us. Thanks to the help of our Creative Manager, Amy and Senior Stylist Aleigh, shooting in our Birmingham Salon, Diner and Shoot Studio we created the following, I hope you enjoy looking through them!

  

The signature shot from our shoot! This picture says everything I want to say about our brand... beautiful uplifting smiling whimsical and dreamy!

Face of Le Keux 2015 winner Danielle poses in our original vintage hood dryers. Doesn't she look perfection...?!

Amber and Bethany pose in our Pink Cadillac seat in our milkshake and sundae's diner which is situated in our vintage salon and party premises in Birmingham (at The Custard Factory). I love these yellow dresses, perfect for Spring!

  

All the girls posing again in our Birmingham diner over some scrumptious afternoon tea which we offer as part of our hen and birthday party packages (in all our locations!).

 

Our Creative Manager Amy and Creative Director, Diablo Rose teaching a cocktail masterclass to our lovely pin-ups, sporting styling but us of course! The back drop is our new 1950s kitchen set which we use for our pin up shoot packages, officially my favourite set now!

The girls get dancing, learning some Lindy Hop, Jive and Swing!

 

Enjoying a peanut butter and banana milkshake (we call it the Elvis!)

One of my favourite shots! Our multi-coloured pastel hair angels posing in our pastel hood dryers!

Bethany's a vision of Summer with her milkshake.

Adore this hair creation, with bow by Amy and roll by me!

Strike a pose, showing off their 'dos!

See more of our hair styles, make up, photo shoots and parties on Facebook!

If you'd like to get in touch with me about any of our services please email info@lekeuxevents.co.uk.

Thank you,

Lynsey x

New Plans and Getting Motivated!

I don't know about you, but I love this time of year. Right after Christmas I get this overwhelming feeling of 'all things possible and new'. I'm think I'm a change-addict. I love doing and experiencing new things and there's nothing like a new year to get me all motivated. 

I'm very lucky that after a four year journey of working all hours, climbing those steep learning curves and realising stress was impacting my health... I've finally gotten to a great place with my work/life balance. I have a wonderful team who look after our premises and customers, leaving me to focus on expansion, strategy and of course... all things NEW!

2015 will be all about my make up range for me. My sister and partner, Diablo Rose and I have been working hard on new product formulas, packaging and broadening our range, we hope to bring all of it to market in the Spring. Here's an exclusive sneak peak of one of the new products I'm very excited about!

One aspect I love about our cosmetics range is that we exclusively use images of customers and staff in our packaging and advertising (with the odd competition winner too!). I love the idea that anyone walking into our salons for a make over could end up adorning our products and walls, and they don't even know it yet!

I'm hoping 2015 will bring the beginnings of new salon location too, we're looking around the South and London for the perfect spot to offer all our services. It's a dream of mine to bring Le Keux to every part of the UK, and the expand to Europe and the US. 

Lastly, I'm starting a new business! Well more of a service. This has been another long-standing ambition of mine. I love all things business and entrepreneurial, besides my family and friends, it's my raison d'etre. Before I took the leap into self employment I had a career in consultancy, project management and process re-engineering/efficiency. I really enjoyed so many aspects of my jobs and aside from every cell in my body screaming to be my own boss (no exaggeration), I did love going into teams, working with people and creating improvements, helping make them more efficient, creating better processes and helping them manage that change. So I am starting up as a Business Coach in the hope that I can support other hopeful or existing entrepreneurs realise their business dreams. If you'd like to take a look at my credentials, and find out about what I'm offering, please visit: www.facebook.com/LeKeuxBusinessCoach.

Wishing you all a motivated 2015. Absolutely anything you want to do with your life is possible, go do it, take a leap, be the 'you' you've always wanted to be this coming year.

Best wishes,

Lynsey Le Keux

My Cosmetics Range

I've not written about this before so I thought I'd share a little about the range my sister Diablo Rose and myself starting developing some four years ago now. I decided to produce my own line, Le Keux Cosmetics because when I went to purchase products to sell in my salon I just couldn't find a beautifully packaged vintage inspired make up range that was affordable and which performed the way I wanted (to create a vintage look). 

I was totally new to the process of creating my own products, I'd studied manufacturing and supply chains at uni, but it's no real preparation; it was a steep learning curve. I knew I had some core values for the range which I was determined to stick to... that the formulas were developed in the UK and that they would be our own, new formulas exactly to our specifications. I wanted the packaging to have an authentic vintage feeling, but also to be fresh and usable. The products must create an authentic vintage look, so for me that was little or no shimmer and glitter which is in most products nowadays. And finally I wanted to be in love with the products I created, I wanted to use them everyday and be proud of what we'd done.

The first challenge I found was the jargon barrier, it was all pantone colour references, codes for types of plastics, nets and more. It was difficult to appear legitimate and experienced when I wasn't familiar with industry language. Secondly timing was essential (see my post of project planning for some insight into tackling the 'critical path' of tasks!) and we really tested that to the last possible parameter with our products arriving the morning of our launch. 

All in all though it's been one of the most rewarding processes I've been through. I think I stuck to my values well, and with determination, some negotiating skills and the incredible creative input I had from Diablo who designed the packaging and helped develop the formulas with our awesome chemist, we got there. We're now in the process of developing more products including more lipstick colours, powder, face cream (which is going to be incredible!) and eye shadow and brow powders. We've also been working on our existing formulas to make them even bolder in colour and longer lasting and I'm adoring the results. Even now, it has still been challenging (not compromising on your vision can make these processes a lot longer) but I'm excited about the new formulas we have, and giving our customers more choice.

So here's our products, I'd love to hear your feedback!

Our complete range, including 5 gorgeous, super soft, non-animal fibre make up brushes, all are dual end, precise and professional quality!

Black Cadillac Eye Liner Paint, designed to be applied as a bold eye liner flick or smudged for a smokey, femme fatale look.

This is Peachy Keen our soft pastel lip paint, the perfect alternative to red for vintage loving girls. This tone suits all skin colours and is fresh. Our lip paints are all infused with cherry scent for truly kissable lips!

Here you can see our pots, designed to look like authentic glass dressing table sets!

The last of our make up products - Whistle Bait Red Lip Paint. This is a bright pillarbox red that can be worn as a gloss, matte or voluptuous Hollywood style.

Instructions on how to use our Black Cadillac Eye Liner Paint.

Beautiful advert designed by Diablo Rose.

The first face of our make up range, the gorgeous August Allure, pin up model. Here she wears Peachy Keen and Black Cadillac.

Wearing Whistle Bait Lip Paint in Hollywood style.

Wearing Black Cadillac Eye Liner Paint and Whistle Bait in matte style.

Our Christmas advertising campaign featuring international burlesque star Anna Fur Laxis.

Winner of our 2013 'Face of Le Keux Cosmetics' competition Eve, modelling a bridal look for a marketing campaign.

We often use our customers in marketing campaigns (they are all so beautiful!), here we have our Valentines advert. In fact our new brush packaging and lipstick boxes will be featuring some more lucky customers from our salons!

And here's our packaging...

 

Guide to Creating a Plan to Drive Results!

Before I whisked myself off into a world of victory rolls and afternoon tea, I worked for nearly six years in the public sector with positions ranging from Business Consultancy to Project and Programme Management and the equally wafflesome Business Process Reengineering (making things work better). I really did love parts of my career before going self employed, and although I'm much happier now, I'm so glad I went through that world first. It gave me the most amazing grounding in disciplines I believe have been essential to the set up and successful growth of the business; planning, designing processes and management systems, setting up websites, procurement, recruitment and financial management.

I hope to do a series of posts sharing my experience of these disciplines and how I've chosen to apply them to a creative business setting. I hope this is helpful to anyone starting out, looking to improve their current operations and re-organise their affairs. I'd welcome your thoughts and comments!

Today I'll start with planning. The greatest piece of advice I can give was actually given to me by my last ever Manager. An inspiring results orientated guy who taught me a lot. I was working as Project Manager for a national disability employment company. I'd been set the task of designing a complex, multi-department project plan, involving a lot of people, tasks and targets. The risks were high and the benefactors of the project were real live people who needed the support of our services.  Ready to get into Microsoft Project and colour code my Gantt chart, put in my gateways and rival the Olympic Park Planning Team, I met with my Manager. He told me directly and in no uncertain terms that a great Project Manager wasn't the one with the fanciest plan, he didn't care what I used to create my plan and had no designs on how I laid it out. What he wanted was a quick, easy to use and regularly updated task list. My time was not to be spent hiding behind documents and methodology but out there negotiating, motivating and monitoring that those tasks were actually being done. That approach has stuck with me ever since. So I'm not going to wax lyrical about how to create complex and impressive 'strategic plans', I'm going to tell you how to put together a simple, effective and workable plan (let's be honest we're self employed, or heading that way because we're do-ers). The only exception to my advice here is business planning for the purpose of loans, seeking investment or such like, I'm referring to personal planning for our own useful purposes.

I define planning as setting out the intentions you have for a project or business stream, detailing what needs to be done to get there, and setting measurements, so you know if you did it. A plan is not something you can tick off the to do list. It's an ongoing, working, continuously updated reference for you and your team to work from. My plans are opened at the start of the day and sit on my desk top, waiting to be updated, re-jigged and used to motivate me to get things done!

Here's how I approach creating the document itself...

1. Define my end goal(s), or to use project jargon 'products'. Sit down and write a list of tangible results you want to achieve. Let's use one my most recent new businesses, our Stags and Barbers, as an example. Our list looked something like this:

Barbershop and games room open
Staff recruited and trained
Activities and services designed and ready to offer
Brand launched and word out there.
etc etc.

These aren't tasks, these are finished results. Tasks will be listed individually under each of the headings above.

2. Decide how you'll know when it's done, or 'performance measures'. The list would start looking something like this:

Barbershop and games room open (Measure: We are able to offer all services from the space)
Staff recruited and trained (Measure: Team present and able to deliver all services on day of opening)
Activities and services designed and on marketing (Measure: Written on website, with prices and description)
Brand launched and word out there (Measure: People at launch event)
etc etc.

3. Detail tasks under each heading, with a deadline and name of who will do it. Be explicit in the task. Realistically assign a time period each task will take to do.

4. Draw out the essential order tasks are to be done in. This is termed critical path analysis in Project Management. The planning geek in me loves this task (you should have seen my Christmas dinner 2010 plan!). So, for example if I'm going to apply critical path analysis to doing my make up, I need to clearly identify which tasks have to be done, before others can be started. It would go like this:

For the purpose of this example, the path shows that nothing in row 2 can be started until the task in row 1 is completed. Then all in row 2 must be completed before row 3 tasks can be started and so forth. This is genuinely really useful, going back my barbers plan, if we look at the section dealing with branding and word getting out there. We knew that getting the word out relied on, amongst others things, press releases being sent out. We had a set opening date, so these had to be sent before press deadlines for issues going out before the opening. Press releases would be written once services are designed etc etc. There's a critical path that clearly says 'this must be done by that date to ensure the rest of the tasks can happen'. As you can imagine, when designed the Olympic Stadium, for example a critical path would be essential when such a vast and complex set of tasks had to be done (and the major delays occurred because so many tasks could not be started until others had been finished!)

4. Make sure those named in the plan know about their tasks and deadlines. We have a shared drive that everyone can access and update their section of the plan. Most start ups, like I was will be just you, which makes that part nice and easy!

5. Do and update. Once you've written your plan, don't sit back feeling smug at what you've achieved. I'm going to be a little unfair and say, creating a plan is not really achieving anything. It's a means to and end, the achievement comes in the ticking off of tasks, the active reworking and editing of the plan in response to changes, lessons learnt, new developments, ideas and those inevitable catastrophes.

My key points on this subject would be:
Don't use a plan a means to procrastinate doing what you set out to do. If you keep creating plans and never doing anything with them, the problem probably isn't plan.
Don't be afraid to change the plan, as with life, things doing always go to... err, plan! Adapt and move with the project but...
Do set deadlines and keep to them as best you can, the plan should drive results.

I hope that's helpful and I'd really appreciate any comments!

Thank you,

Lynsey