Foxy, Inclusive, and Sustainable with Kyla Dufresne

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

Stephen Sakach (0:17)

Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host Tullio Siragusa and a special guest who we'll introduce in a moment. So, beauty in personal care businesses touch on something deeply human. They involve confidence, vulnerability, identity, and feeling someone carries with them as they walk out the door. And that means every detail matters, how people are greeted, how teams are trained, how services are described, and even what happens to the waste of business produces. And today we're going to explore a lot of that. And we're really going to talk about building community, inclusivity, and sustainable beauty through the story of the Foxy Box Laser and Wax Bar. And Tullio, introduce our special guest today.

Tullio Siragusa (1:05)

Absolutely. It will be my pleasure. Our guest today is Kyla Dufresne. She's the founder and CEO of Foxy Box Laser and Wax Bar. Kyla built Foxy Box from humble beginnings, waxing out of a back of a jewelry store into a bold hair removal franchise. Brand is centered on the belief that feeling Foxy is not a luxury, but a basic human right. Foxy Box is known for its playful, confident brand personality, but behind the energy is a serious commitment to inclusion, community and sustainability. The company is Green Circle Certified, hosts community initiatives like Foxy Fest, and has removed gender language from its verbiage to help create a more welcoming experience for everyone.

Kyla, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

Kyla Dufresne (1:58)

Thank you guys so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Stephen Sakach (2:02)

Kyla, yeah, Tullio mentioned community, sustainability, inclusion.

Let's begin with inclusion. He mentioned the gender language as well. In beauty and hair removal business, why does language matter so much?

Kyla Dufresne (2:15)

Oh, my gosh.

We pride ourselves on being a safe space for everyone. We want our services to be accessible to everybody. I want to say, Stephen, probably five or six years ago, we had a customer reach out and say, I'm trying to book an appointment, but I don't know what to book for. Back then, I started the company 14 years ago. Back then, we had male services and female services. It's funny, male services were more expensive than female services as well. We had legs back and everything was priced differently. We had two different categories. We had a customer call and say, I don't know what to book for because I identify as a female.

I just thought to myself, why are we making this complicated for people? If we pride ourselves on being a safe space for everyone, we just need to make a change.

At that time, I still see this in the beauty industry. Even if you look at hair salons even, they'll have male cuts and female cuts. Really, there's just no need for that language. It can be short hair or long hair. There's just not really a need to put gender into services.

We removed all of our gender from our menu. I had created that because that's just what was the norm, and that's what I saw when I was creating my business. I'm like, okay, I'm looking at how to price myself and what services I should offer, all these things. We removed all the gender from our verbiage. We made one menu, full legs, underarms, whatever all the services are. But the only difference is that for Brazilian waxing, we changed the service based on anatomy, not on gender. So we have 20-minute Brazilian for people with a vulva, 40-minute Brazilian for people with a penis. So they book in by anatomy, not by gender. We make it simple. And so that's just what we did moving forward. And I'll preach on this to everyone who owns a beauty salon. That's just an easy change that you can do. If you are truly an inclusive space, that's for our workers, our staff, for everyone. We want to make everybody feel good and welcome and safe in our locations. And that's just the easiest thing that you can do. There's just no need for gender in your menu.

Stephen Sakach (4:42)

Now, I heard this story not too long ago. The CEO was sitting down in the same sort of beauty industry, sitting down in one of the locations and one of the customers there had traveled five hours to come to this location, to, I think, get a haircut.

Just because of that.

Tullio Siragusa (5:04)

Bishops.

Stephen Sakach (5:05)