How to Legally Protect Yourself as a Beauty Business Owner
Handling the legal side of a business is a different kind of legal than what most people are familiar with. Typically, people contact lawyers when something goes wrong and they need help.
When it comes to business, it’s all about getting a handle on the legal BEFORE something goes wrong. This means hiring a lawyer before you ever have a single legal problem. If a beauty business owner is looking to save money, time, and stress, hiring a lawyer sooner rather than later is the way to go.
This is something I talked about with Helena Garrett on an episode of her podcast, 6 Figure Beauty Boss®. We chatted about everything from the importance of speaking to a lawyer when you create a beauty business to investing in your mental health and self-care as a beauty business owner.
Listen to the episode here or read on to find out how to legally protect yourself and your beauty business.
The importance of having legal protection when you create a beauty business
On the podcast episode, Helena mentioned that as beauty business owners, you go to beauty school, get your license, and learn how to perform services, but you don’t learn how to run a business. This is where she, a business coach, and I, a lawyer, can help because as she mentions, “it’s not just about being a great service provider.”
As a lawyer, I can help you figure out where you’re going in the future. I’ll help you figure out things like whether you need a business entity like an LLC or a corporation, and what types of contracts you may need depending on your goals, employees, and products. I can help navigate any issues that come up to help prevent you from having to rebrand a business you love so much. Being a beauty business owner is hard enough, it’s not something you should make harder on yourself by not having legal protection.
Helena hit the nail on the head when she said, “When you grow and you impact more, people are going to see that, so if you don’t protect yourself, that’s when issues can arise.”
How soon you should consult a lawyer as a beauty business owner
If you can have a consultation with a lawyer early on in your business - even as early as coming up with a business name or as soon as you launch your business - this is the ideal time to talk about legal protection.
We both highly recommend having a consultation before even hiring a branding person or investing in branding. This is especially important in the beauty industry when offering signature services because certain words, names, or products overlap a lot and you need to make sure what you’re choosing isn’t potentially infringing on someone else.
“Beautiful branding is cool and all, but if you’re copying someone, that’ll hurt you in the long run.”
When beauty business owners hire me, I set up a roadmap with all clients depending on what services they are offering. The roadmap will lay out what you need now vs. what you need later. For example, you might need a certain contract now, a trademark in 6 months, and different contracts later if you’re hiring employees/contractors, collaborating with other businesses, or co-offering some type of services.
Many business owners are scared of the overhead that it may cost, but by laying out a roadmap like this, you don’t have to spend $10,000+ now. We figure out together what you need, then make a plan to budget for the future and figure out when you need to invest in those things.
How trademarks can help protect your beauty business
Filing a trademark is one of the biggest things when it comes to legal protection in the beauty industry. This can be not only for your business name, but a logo, tagline, slogan, or even product line name, or signature service name too. For an online business owner, if they have to rebrand because someone files for a trademark first, it’s not going to take as much time or money to change a logo or a website (although still annoying and possibly detrimental to your brand).
In the beauty industry, you’re more likely to have physical assets like a brick-and-mortar location, signage, business cards, physical products, and other things that are huge expenses. It is much more expensive to rebrand as a beauty business owner, which is why filing a trademark early can be so crucial.
If you’re thinking that having an LLC will protect you, it won’t. An LLC helps protect your personal assets but doesn’t have anything to do with your business name. No one can have the same exact LLC name as you in your state, but there are 49 other states they can file for an LLC with the same name or they can name their LLC something extremely similar - something as simple as adding an ‘s’ to the end of one of the words, like “Lash Artist” vs. “Lash Artists”. You don’t want this to happen because it can confuse your customers.
So, trademarks will not only protect you from having to rebrand, but they’ll also protect you from anyone having something similar which can result in a loss of customers. If you’re not sure whether you’re ready for a trademark, read this blog post which has 3 questions you need to answer.
The benefits of getting legal protection from the beginning of your career as a beauty business owner
The biggest benefit of legally protecting your beauty business is the time and money (and headaches and stress) you will save by avoiding a rebrand. When you are building your business, the goal is to become well known. Some people see you doing well with your brand and decide to brand themselves with a similar name and then file a trademark before you do. Or, they may not have ever heard of you and just came up with a similar name and prioritized their trademark before you did.
So ultimately, would you rather spend $2,000 on a trademark now or $10,000-$100,000 fighting for a chance to keep your brand or having to rebrand just because you waited a couple of years?
This is an extreme example, but I saw a TikTok from a product-based business owner where she told her audience about how not having a trademark is costing her tens of thousands of dollars. One of her followers filed a trademark application for the TikToker’s brand name and tried to sell it back to her for $17,000. Fighting this legally could cost even more than that, so she was essentially forced to rebrand. Unfortunately, she also had a lot of inventory, which made rebranding even more costly.
Currently, I have a few clients in the beauty industry fighting for their mark because someone out there filed something similar before they did, so I cannot emphasize enough that always being the first to file is the most important thing, especially because it takes about a year for a trademark to get approved.
Some of these people did not file before my clients maliciously to steal their name, they did it without knowing the law, or without caring about the law. Not everyone that files a trademark before someone else that is already using it is doing it to screw you, but whether they knew about you or not - you will be the one to suffer the costs (and stress).
Oftentimes, these issues can be prevented with a trademark consultation or filing for a trademark at the beginning of setting up your beauty business.
Helena's experience with legal issues and having to rebrand her entire business
About 3.5 years into her business, someone trademarked Helena’s name. At this point, she was ranked #1 on Google and had a salon, employees, and a product line. Because of her success with building out her name and brand, she thought she was protected, but she wasn’t. I helped Helena rebrand everything because this person filed a trademark for her name before she did.
It cost a lot of money, and while she could’ve gone to court or a few different options, she decided to rebrand because it was more cost-effective. In the podcast, she mentioned that the most upsetting part was that she was forced into rebranding and hadn’t saved up for it.
Now Helena tells her coaching clients that if they have a name they’re going to stick with, to make sure everything is legalized for their beauty business. If they’re going to diversify income with product lines, hire employees, or anything else while building their empire, she always suggests having a consultation with a lawyer to talk about legal protection.
How having legal protection helps with mindset, mental health, and success as a beauty business owner
Mindset and mental health are rarely talked about when it comes to being any kind of business owner. When I started my law firm in 2020, I thought I just needed someone to tell me the strategy (do ABC to get from here to there then do XYZ), but when I started, I realized that mindset plays much more of a role than strategy.
My first year in my business was filled with imposter syndrome and anxiety. Helena has also felt this! Along with the pressure to be doing all the things all the time which has led to her wanting to burn everything to the ground at times - a feeling that I think many entrepreneurs can relate to.
“We’re in business to take care of our clients, but how can we take care of them without taking care of ourselves?”
It’s a hard truth, but this pressure never fully goes away - for any business owner. Whenever you reach a new level in your business, there’s something you’ll have to deal with.
To disprove the anxiety and doubts, I like to take a step back and look for evidence. I do this by looking behind me and seeing that, “I started this business and started getting clients” -that’s proof I can do this. “Clients are successfully able to register their trademarks” - ok that’s proof that what I am doing IS working. Looking for things that validate the positive side of things and what you have achieved can help you remember that you CAN do this and you CAN run a successful business.
After having to rebrand her business, Helena did start to spiral. It affected her confidence and made her feel like a failure (which she is NOT - and never was). Helena spent time in therapy which helped her realize that her business is such a beautiful thing, but if she isn’t in control of her mental health, she won’t be able to reach the potential that she could.
Going through this rebrand and then getting in control of her mental health is why she highly suggests that especially if you have anxiety, you should protect your beauty business NOW instead of later.
To hear Helena and I expand on the importance of legal protection as a beauty business owner and the topics in this blog post, listen to the full podcast episode here.
Need contracts for your business? Check out my contract templates.
Looking for a trademark consultation? Book a call with me here.
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