Ever since she was little, Chloe Scates (12) has had a love for makeup. This interest combined with an admiration of her parents’ entrepreneurship in a plan for her own cosmetics venture, which she plans to start the day she graduates. She wants to sell lip kits, including gloss and liner, lash kits, with glue, tweezers and lash clusters, and more that she hasn’t yet decided on.
“I’ve been wanting to start this business since I was literally a little girl,” Scates said. “It just came to me, because since I was a little girl, I’ve always loved makeup, hair, all of that.”
Scates has been planning the business for years. She started an Instagram account two years ago and started posting on it last year.
She has sold a few products so far, but is waiting until graduation to start devoting more time to the venture.
“I just feel like I’m so busy,” Scates said. “School takes up so much of my time.”
Scates has wanted to do hair ever since she began braiding the hair of her Barbies, and she wants her business to include doing people’s hair. She is currently in the cosmetology program at the Wilson Talent Center, where she practices doing hair.
“I never really planned to go to college, because there’s not anything in college that I wanted to do,” Scates said. “I knew all my life, that I wanted to have a business.”
“I haven’t really focused that much on hair, because it takes so much time,” Scates said. “And I don’t like when I do somebody’s hair and then have them looking crazy, so I feel like I need more practice as of right now.”
In addition to Scates’s history of interest in hair and makeup, her family has a history with entrepreneurship, which has motivated her to pursue a career path as an entrepeneur. Her dad owns a trucking business and does real estate, and her mom started a daycare about a year ago.
“I just aspire to be them,” Scates said.
From being too young to understand her dad’s explanations of his ambitions for his trucking business to helping her mom with policies for daycare business more recently, Scates has grown up with entrepreneurship. Additionally, she has many entrepreneurial ambitions for her future.
“I do really want to stick with entrepreneurship, because I don’t really want to work for anybody,” Scates said.
First of all, Scates hopes to start making her own cosmetics. She also hopes to own Airbnbs, vending machines and her own salon. She doesn’t want to work in someone else’s salon because of the drama that can occur in the environment. However, Scates wants to move out of the Lansing area in order to be able to better pursue her goals, to a place such as Atlanta, where more people would stay in Airbnbs.
The name of Scates’s business is Eileen’s Dollhouse. She wanted to use the name Eileen because it is her middle name as well as her grandma’s middle name.
“I just wanted to name it after her, because she died when I was younger,” Scates said.
Her first venture into entrepreneurship was in middle school, when she would do her friends’ nails. However, she didn’t continue this for very long. But the motivation to start a cosmetics business returned in her freshman year of high school.
