Spa And Store Lena Rose Opens Second Location In Chicago Area
Lena Rose is doubling down on the Chicago area.
The clean beauty spa and boutique has opened a 1,750-square-foot location in Naperville, Ill, a suburb about an hour’s drive from Chicago, with two treatment rooms for facials and body treatments such as scrubs, wraps and scalp massages and four nail stations for manicures and pedicures. The location is a second for Lena Rose, an early mover in the green and clean beauty category that bowed in Chicago in 2016.
At the helm of Lena Rose, founder and CEO Jenny Duranski has watched the beauty retail landscape in Chicago change. Credo planted a location in the city a few months after Lena Rose opened. With Lena Rose’s branch in Naperville, it’s joining a retail scene blossoming with beauty concepts. Med-spas and beauty specialty retailers like Sephora, Ulta Beauty and Bluemercury have popped up in the area.
Still, Duranski says, “They don’t have anything clean and green out here in the suburbs, so we’re bringing something very new to them and very needed. I want to offer clean and green nail services, facial services and retail to the suburbs. Chicago has now developed, and we’ve got a lot of options, but the suburbs are still very slow to have these options.”
Services drive about 70% of Lena Rose’s business, and retail makes up the balance. It carries 750 stockkeeping units from approximately 20 clean beauty brands, including Blissoma, Laurel, Province Apothecary, Apoterra, Axiology, Unsun Cosmetics and Habit. Lena Rose prioritizes ingredient-focused clean beauty brands with minimal packaging in its third-party brand assortment. Laurel’s Sun Serum, Blissoma’s Smooth A+ Correcting Serum and Apoterra’s Rose Toner are among its bestselling brands and products.
Lena Rose’s expansion is part of a strategy to future-proof the retailer against macroeconomic turmoil that has hobbled many beauty shops lately. “For a lot of the brick-and-mortars, I feel like right now it’s like we either have to grow or we need to close,” says Duranski. “The economy in Chicago is very uncertain, and there’s a lot of movement happening. People are leaving the city for all sorts of reasons. Plus, we’re in an election year. So, to almost insulate the whole company, I needed to enter a new market.”
Situated in Naperville’s bustling downtown, Lena Rose is busy cultivating a suburban customer base that skews younger than its predominantly gen X customer base in Chicago. Since the location premiered in November, foot traffic at it has been ramping up slowly. Duranski admits her feelings about the expansion alternate between optimism and uneasiness.
“The people we are meeting are really excited about our business. It’s a slow build, though,” she says. “Growing fast can bring you the money you need to pay back all the debt you took on, but I would much rather have a slower build. It will be so much better off for us in the long run, but this is a huge risk, and we could totally crash and burn. We’ve doubled our team, we’ve doubled our expenses and we’ve exhausted our working capital.”
Cash flow from Lena Rose’s Chicago location and loans from Duranski’s friends and family financed Lena Rose’s Naperville location. Duranski mentions she had $2,000 in her bank account when she spotted what would become Lena Rose’s Naperville location in early 2023. The retailer’s Chicago store generated roughly $550,000 in sales last year. The Naperville store is projected to reach the equivalent amount this year, although Duranski is hoping to double it in forthcoming years.
Duranski planned to add Lena Rose locations as far back as 2019, but ended up shelving the plans after moving back to her Naperville, her hometown, and her father’s death. The same year, Lena Rose’s Chicago store moved to a bigger space. In 2020, the pandemic forced Lena Rose to close for six months, and it laid off its entire staff of 11 employees. Once it reopened, facial services were heavily restricted, pushing a pivot to nail services to keep the lights on.
Trained as a nail technician, Duranski toiled alone in the store for almost a year providing manicures and pedicures. At one point, she drew a waiting list that was two-and-a-half months’ long. “I would work three to four 12-hour days a week doing nails,” she says. “I was booked and busy, but I was doing everything. I was still open as an online retailer fulfilling orders and marketing as best I could, but this is what entrepreneurs do. You figure it out. You wear all the hats and just try to make it work.”
By spring 2021, demand for facial and body services gained steam at Lena Rose, and it began rehiring staff. Today, it has 10 employees across locations. Duranski detects that customers are spacing out beauty service visits farther than they did before the pandemic due to rising prices and shifting behaviors, a pattern that has also been affecting hair salons. Lena Rose’s top services are $55 manicures featuring Dazzle Dry, a fast-drying long-wearing natural polish nail system, and $150 chakra body treatments.
An in-house Lena Rose product line was another pandemic-era pivot. Created in Duranski’s mother’s kitchen during lockdown, it encompasses 10 bath and body products such as body butters, scrubs, soaks and oils priced from $12 to $44. Hand-made by Duranski in small batches, the line current accounts for about 50% of Lena Rose’s retail sales.
Duranski prefers to keep Lena Rose’s third-party brand selection edited, but she expects to enlarge it going forward. Reviving the retailer’s makeup business is high on her priority list this year as more gen Z customers interested in makeup walk through its doors in Naperville. Presently, Axiology is the only makeup brand available at Lena Rose. Prior to the pandemic, the spa and boutique carried makeup brands Ere Perez and Fitglow Beauty.
While the term “clean” has usurped “green” in the beauty industry lexicon, Lena Rose is holding strong to its roots as a green beauty business. “I wouldn’t consider myself a clean beauty retailer,” says Duranski. “I still love the term ‘green beauty’ because it signals the environmental initiatives that we have in place within the company. We compost on-site. We have TerraCycle partnerships. We have waterless services to conserve our water. I love working with farmers to directly source ingredients for our products. So, I love the originality of green beauty.”