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| Tiyana Robinson |
She knows her speedy success
is rare in an industry rife with talent but the inability to hinge it to
financial prosperity. In a post on her Instagram, she acknowledges she's
accomplished in a few years what takes many other artists a couple decades to
do. It isn't self-congratulatory or to diminish anyone else: She just knows
those odds are very rare and is trying to address why.
Her own journey to makeup
followed a self-described “dark period”: She'd lost her job managing a hair
extensions company when it abruptly went under. The economy was still
struggling post-2008 mortgage crisis, and Robinson couldn't find a job.
Completely broke, she eventually moved back home with her parents and felt like
a complete failure.
Robinson had grown up wanting
to repay her family for what they'd given her. At first, that seemed to come by
having a career that looked good on paper. She initially planned to go to law
school but squashed it when her instincts told her that wasn't her true path.
Listening to that little
voice of intuition has guided her through rough times and to her true passion
as a makeup artist. It's also guided her to people who pushed her up levels,
creatively and in other ways. One of those people was celebrity makeup artist
Renny Vasquez, whom she initially took classes from and who has since become a
friend and mentor. When she watched Vasquez applying makeup in a class, the
lightbulb moment occurred. She saw someone doing what he was passionate about
and making a good living at it.
“I remember sitting in the
audience and saying to myself, 'That is going to be me,'” Robinson said.
Although she didn't have a
single client yet, she left the class and bought the first items for her kit,
which she clearly remembers and included Alcone sponges and Ben Nye Banana
Powder. She began doing makeup on friends and posting the images to Instagram
and her Facebook accounts. Her efforts attracted people's attention, although it
was still mostly a hobby for her.
Around that time, she was out
with her then-boyfriend (she's since married) when they began talking to a
friend who was a fitness competitor. The woman asked Robinson to do her makeup
for an upcoming competition. Robinson was taken aback - “Someone is willing to
pay me to do this?" - but she agreed, partly out of desperation. Still
underemployed, she frankly needed the money.
With time, Robinson's
clientele began to build up. She was side-hustling as a makeup artist, booking
out most weekends doing weddings. However, when she looked at her bank account
versus her workload, the numbers were disappointing.
Robinson wanted to figure out
how to move beyond a side-hustler: She wanted to make doing makeup a profitable
pursuit. Most artists she saw were doing this as a side-gig while making a
living at day jobs. The information on the business aspect of makeup artistry
wasn't easy to find. She eventually hired a business mentor who taught her how
to make her passion a profitable living. Today, Robinson moves in a team of
women who marry passion with entrepreneurship, who understand that nobody makes
it alone and push each other to the next level, creatively and financially.
This is an uncomfortable
discussion for many artists, how to marry money with their passion. The term
“starving artist” exists for a reason.
Robinson's message to artists
is that if they are going to make this their business, they need to have
discussions that will initially feel very uncomfortable: They need to know how
to market and promote themselves, how to set and justify their prices, and how
to attract clients. The artistic and entrepenurial minds in a person need to
merge, something our culture struggles with and doesn't teach in the mainstream
education system.
“Many makeup artists want to
be in the background, to show up and just do the work, but you need to realize
you're your own Director of Marketing and VP of Sales,” she said.
Robinson's message isn't
purely formulaic. There's a component she talks passionately about which she
thinks helped drive her business so fast:
She practices gratitude. A
lot.
Not sure that message is
being taught to Harvard MBA candidates, but Robinson says it's a critical
component of financial success. As much as she says her trajectory has been
“magical,” she attributes a lot of that magic to staying grateful even during
the moments that send a lot of people into a spiral.
“The reality is, plenty of
bad things happen to me,” she said, “but my default switch is gratitude. By
staying grateful, things do work out for the best. I realize in time why one
situation didn't come together. It's because something better was on the way.”
She has quickly defined
herself as someone who does “luxury brown beauty,” a term she hashtags on most
of her makeup photos to Instagram.
“I wanted to focus on
creating that real sense of red-carpet glamour on women of color,” she said.
It's a hole that she found in
the beauty market, a gap that still exists despite all the strides in featuring
more women of color in print and addressing their needs.
“I don't know if brands think think black women don't
care about beauty and self-care, but we do,” she said. “We spend billions of
dollars a year on beauty. That's a huge opportunity for them.”
Robinson can recall specific
products that addressed black women's needs but were suddenly removed from
distribution by mass retailers like Target. She's been in those deflating
moments of standing in the middle of a store, looking for the product and
realizing it had been abruptly removed.
Launching and sustaining a
business is scary for many, but Robinson has some strong words of advice for
anyone who decides to move in the direction of entrepreneurship.
“You can't be risk-averse,”
she said. “Remember what giving birth is like for women: messy and painful, but
in the end there's something beautiful.”
Some of Robinson's Makeup Work (Images used with her permission):
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