“I was convinced by my sister in law and her sister to go to beauty school because I used to like to do nails for fun,” Raquelle Anne Nemedez says, explaining that originally she wasn’t planning to be a lash tech.
The 32-year-old Reno native now owns her own lash business called Lashed by Raq, located in South Reno, near the new DMV located on Diamond Pkwy.
When Nemedez first started out, she prioritized the relationships with her clients and a majority of the new ones were sorority girls. The Gen Z generation likes the ‘put together look’ without doing a full face of makeup, she says.
Nemedez enrolled into the Redken International Academy of Style located on Market St. in Reno. For nine months, while she practiced lashing on her cousin “to make sure I was doing the right thing cause if I didn't like it, I wasn't going to continue doing it. I haven't stopped since,” she said.
In school people always discussed “you can work for someone or you can work for yourself.” And “ I wanted to work for myself,” she said.
After graduating from beauty school, she says it wasn't hard to get her own business started in Reno.
After making business cards and creating social media content, she started out with half a dozen clients. Word of mouth then kept her business going at a time the lash field was just getting bigger.
As her own boss, she found out she could have more control over which hours she was in the salon.
The most important thing Nemedez found out was “relationships are everything for me in my business, and it's not about new clients all the time.. It's about retaining clients by getting to know them on a personal level and having someone you're comfortable with,” she said.
December will mark her sixth year as an independent lash tech and a successful business woman.
Reporting by Grace Kaplan shared with Our Town Reno