MIRACLE AT MARR MIRAGE Creating a Place Where Visions of Beauty Become Reality
	JUNE 2005

by Maryanne Parker
Photos by Russell Byrne

I was one of the pioneers in the current fingernail revolution. I developed a passion for doing fingernails before most women began to realize that fancy fingernails were desirable and long before entrepreneurs realized that fingernail art would one day become an industry.

I taught myself to do fingernails through a lot of trial and error, beginning during play sessions when I was a little girl. I remember gluing my mom’s tips onto my own fingers when I was only 12 years old. As my nail plates would grow, the tips would crack and break off. I kept playing with them and gradually learned how to care for artificial nails.

Embracing Fingernail Technology
My youthful enthusiasm carried me beyond mere artificial glue-ons. I began playing with liquids and powders, trying to learn how to build an actual artificial nail. I discovered how to fill nail plates with the right combination of powders and liquids to form a fingernail that looked natural, but more beautiful than nature, herself, was capable of producing.

I went to beautician school to become a manicurist. I wasn’t interested in the rest of the curriculum; I just wanted to do nails. The schools in those days only taught manicures and pedicures. I had to teach myself how to do acrylic or porcelain nails. I got my license and business really took off. I was good! My nails didn’t break or lift. They were very natural looking. I was on the cutting edge of what was becoming a major revolution.

I was born with an entrepreneurial spirit I guess, because I was only 19 years old when I hung the sign up on my first nail shop. I called the place “Nail Professionals.” It was only 100 square feet, but a year later I moved up to a larger, 300 square foot place and hired two other people to work with me. From the beginning I never had trouble attracting customers because I was good at what I did. When I finished with her fingernails, any of my customers could leave my shop with hands that would turn heads. I kept outgrowing facilities. My current location, in the Sand Creek Shopping Center, is the fourth salon I built. I did the construction in all of my shops. I put my first full-service salon together for 5,000 dollars in cash and about a million bucks worth of elbow grease.

I remarried after getting rid of my last spa and dropped out of business for a while and only did nails as a sideline, mainly for long-time customers. My new husband eventually discovered how much my clients loved me and learned how good I was at my profession. He saw that I’ve had people following me from location to location with a loyalty spanning more than two decades, in some cases. He is a police sergeant with a lot of willpower himself. He decided that I should get back into the business and encouraged me to design and build the spa of my dreams.

My husband has gifts at understanding how people’s minds work. He saw how much I loved working with customers, but understood that I didn’t like managing people. He works graveyards and agreed to help take care of the business during the days, which would free me up to attend to my customers.

After I became convinced that my spouse and I could make Marr Mirage happen together, I began to stay awake until my husband’s 5 a.m. shift ended, spending the entire time, usually curled up on my bed, looking at magazines, making notes, and growing my vision. I bought graph paper and began to sketch floor plans of the facility that was beginning to take place in my mind. I labored over color schemes and lighting details. I would often work all night long.

Getting the lighting right proved to be the most difficult challenge. A lighting specialist walking through Marr Mirage could see that each light has been selected and positioned to serve a meaningful purpose. I took the same care with the accessories in each room as I took with the lighting. I would mentally put myself in each room. I would look around in my imagination and ask myself the question, “If I were working in here what would I want? Hairdressers require lots of drawers, for example. An esthetician needs lots of water. Each type of treatment has needs that differ from the others. The typical one-size-fits-all approach results in room designs that work against some of the needs of the operator doing her particular job.

The Marr Mirage Miracle
The Marr Mirage Salon & Spa is by far my most ambitious project — and most difficult. I built this place with a lot of heartaches, blood, sweat, and tears. My husband, stepson, and I built this beautiful place, together with the help of some friends and other family members. Fortunately, I’m a hands-on person and not afraid to climb up on a scaffold and begin hammering in nails. So we were able to begin construction and start taking things one step at a time.

I taught myself to hang sheetrock on a wall and to apply the tape and mud that hides sheetrock joints. I laid 19,000 pounds of granite floor. Through poor planning, we had to shovel four dump trucks full of gravel and dirt from one spot to another three different times. I painted walls, and laid down seams of grout that were smooth as a baby’s bottom. A lot of sacrifice and love went into Marr Mirage construction. I often worked from eight a.m. to five a.m., seven days a week, for an entire year in order to turn my vision into realty.

Most people never get to see a dream actually come true in the literal way in which I witnessed mine as contractors began building cabinets, installing furniture, and creating waterfalls. Sample palettes and swatches of rug fabrics began turning into rooms filled with light and color. I’ve created a facility that really does manage to do what I set out to accomplish. Marr Mirage incorporates a spirit of tranquility and comfortable excellence into its design.

Gearing up for Success
I’m tough on my staff because I insist upon perfection. I want them to understand that clients need to be taken care of. On the other hand, I love the people working for me and I work hard to try to keep them satisfied and even fulfilled in their profession. The girls have confidence in their work. I try to meet the needs of my staff at the same time as I train them to fulfill the needs of our customers. It’s always a tightrope act to keep our prices competitive while maintaining our high quality — preserving the happiness of the staff while keeping clients delighted with our service.

We aim to provide elegant service for normal people. Customers feel no need to fix themselves up to come for a visit. Some women come dressed in sweats others with Gucci accessories. No problem either way because we’re running a come-as-you-are facility here. Marr Mirage Spa Directors circulate through the facility and take care of the customers. People who come in for a package, for example, are offered amenities such as a bowl of soup, a dish of salad, or a glass of wine. Our retail area specializes in selling the products that we use ourselves. If a customer likes a massage cream one of our operators used on her, for example, she can buy a jar of it and take it home with her.

I like my staff. I have to admit, however, that I find the challenges of running the business and especially in dealing with 27 women to be, at times, overwhelming. I’m glad I have a safety valve. Before we started the project my supportive and loving husband agreed to help me with staff issues, and he does a great job of that. My husband is a great people person. He looks like a cross between a Hollywood movie star and a professional athlete, which, I imagine, makes it easier for the girls to want to please him. In addition, he does all the legal stuff and even writes memos for me. He takes care of things like policies and procedures.

Running a full-service health spa the size of Marr Mirage is a fulltime job for me — two fulltime jobs, in fact. I usually come in about ten a.m. and often work until 2 a.m. I spend the entire night here sometimes. I do all the cleaning myself and maintain the glamour and elegance of this place only by dint of hard labor. People sometimes laugh at the irony of the fact that, even though my specialty has been nails, I don’t wear artificial nails myself. I have working hands. My hands are banging away with a hammer or wringing out a scrub rag far more often than they are holding a cocktail glass or even writing with a ballpoint pen.

Everything is coming together for me in my life. I have a lot of willpower and just make things happen. I believe that success depends upon more than simply hard work, however. When you go through life with integrity and honesty, and do your best not to harm people, good things just naturally come to you. I believe that not being excellent towards others diminishes everything else in our lives. And my goal has been excellence in everything I do.

My mission is to provide every client who walks through the door of my salon with a relaxing, stress-free, high-quality, excellent experience. I’m trying to do my best for everyone I know. Only the best is good enough for me and for my customers. For a little while they leave the world behind because Marr Mirage really does seem like a mirage or a vision, perhaps; our service might seem like a dream; we can give people makeovers that might appear to be a miracle because my salon is a place where vision becomes reality.