Life & Work with Emily and Lauren Lamb and Jones of Burbank

Today we’d like to introduce you to Emily and Lauren Lamb and Jones

Hi Emily and Lauren, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Lauren and I have been friends for over 15 years. We met in middle school english class and instantly clicked. We attended highschool together and later went on to beauty school together as well. Right out of high school we attended beauty school at Pasadena City College. Lauren initially went in to pursue a makeup career and Emily went to possibly pursue esthetics. After completing our hours, we both decided hair was the route we wanted to take.After completing beauty school, we were both working at different salons in Burbank and spent the next few years building our clientele through social media and referrals. After a couple of years, Lauren left the valley to work at Salon Republic in West Hollywood and Emily opened a suite at Salon Republic in Burbank. During the pandemic, hairstylists were one of the many professions that werent allowed to work so Lauren and I had lots of time off. During this time, we spent a lot of time together and decided to join forces and start a business.

We launched The Mane Moment in July 2022. We felt the salon apparel industry was lacking and no one was prioritizing the luxury aspect of the item your client wears during their appt. Realizing this was a grey zone in the salon market we jumped on it and spent the next year and half designing our perfect “Luxury Styling Cape” and launching it summer of 2022. We picked up traction pretty quickly through marketing on social media and have never looked back. A couple months before TMM turned one and still working our full time jobs behind the chair, we made the decision to open up a “headquarters” so we could combine both The Mane Moment and our hairstylist businesses. We have utilized this space as a creative studio. We take all our TMM content shoots, keep inventory, and work behind the chair here. It is a full service creative playground for the two of us where we really are able to have all our business ventures in one space. 2023 was our best year yet, we spent majority of the year building our gorgeous creative space together while up keeping the growth of TMM. 2023 was also a huge year for our personal lives as well… Emily welcomed a baby girl and celebrated her marriage while Lauren got engaged to her partner of 8 years!

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Obstacles/Challenges I think we both faced early in our hairstylist career was building a clientele from ground zero. We aren’t rare this is a very common struggle for many early stylist. Emily and I both come out of school ready to hit the ground running making plenty of sacrafices from missing events and social gatherings, working extremely long hours and coming in on off days to have the clientele we have today. Building a dream clientele is not for the faint of heart but very rewarding once you have gotten to that point in your career.

After getting through the early years of growing pains in our career, I think we both really had the feeling of “is this a forever thing”. As fruitful and flexible as hairstyling can be it is also very taxing on the body and makes you wonder are these 12 hour days going to possible at 50.

During the pandemic we had the down time to really sit down and decide if we should join forces to create something together. That is when the idea of TMM was born. We did go through a few ideas before landing on luxury salon apparel. Once having a clear vision of what we wanted, we started at ground zero! When I tell you Emily and I knew nothing about starting a company… we knew NOTHING. It took us eight months just to find the fabric we were looking for and that was just the start of many early battles in building a company.

Emily nor I have had any proper business training through school. We have used what we know through growing our own individual hair businesses and leaning on the help of our partners who are in business and finance to really help get us to where TMM is today.

To this day, TMM is a couple months out from being two and we are still very much on a learning curve. Owning any type of business is humbling and I think that has been our biggest lesson through our careers. One of our most humbling obstacles has been opening Studio MANE. Our Salon has been such a labor of love and I dont think either of us had any idea the level of stress it would put us through pulling that space together but we did it and we lived to tell the tale!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Emily and I are both Blonding/natural balayage specialist. We own a Salon space together called Studio MANE.
Studio MANE houses our hairstylist businesses and our luxury salon apparel company The Mane Moment.

The Mane Moment is like our baby that we have created together. So I think it holds a special place in both our hearts and creating Studio MANE is just the cherry on top.

Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
The biggest lesson we’ve learned is how important it is to always work together. Mixing business and friendship is not an easy task but with constant communication and compromising we make it work!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://themanemoment.com
• Instagram: themanemoment

Image Credits
Sarah Shen