VERO BEACH — For a woman who sells relaxation and indulgence, Tanja McGuire can’t even make time to nurse a cold. Recently, hoarse with strep throat, she juggled cell phone calls driving herself to the doctor, having just wrapped up Spa Week at John’s Island, where 12 of her estheticians and “nail therapists” as she calls them, served up manicures and makeup.
Next on her to-do list: ordering orchids for the latest addition to her beachside boutique spa empire.
This time McGuire is expanding upwards, not out.
A new studio upstairs will more than double the space of her original Ocean Drive spa and boutique, A Pampered Life.
Her flagship spa now features new services, including couple’s massage, organic permanent cosmetics, holistic health coaching, and injections of Botox and cosmetic fillers delivered by its new medical director, plastic surgeon Dr. Alan Durkin.
In truth, the flagship is more skiff than ship, an intimate retail space in front and an even more intimate treatment space in the rear.
Somehow, even though its products are calming pleasures, McGuire runs the room like a proton inside a collider.
She dabs eye shadow on one customer, then leaps behind the counter to ring up another, all the while gabbing with seasonal customers returning from summer.
They are stopping in to browse the perfumes, creams, bathrobes, and a newly installed make-up bar of mineral make up.
Many of the brands are exclusive to McGuire in Vero: Philosophy, Bliss, Moulton Brown and Bare Minerals, her make-up line.
On a back wall is the distinctive white packaging of Obagi, a line typically seen only in doctors’ offices offering facials and other treatments by a staff esthetician.
For the first time, McGuire has aligned herself with a medical director and will offer the Obagi line under his care.
Like trying testers for foundation, McGuire shopped until she found the right doctor to work with her.
Durkin, who joined Dr. Ferdinand Becker’s practice in April of last year, could use a little relaxation himself.
He has just taken ownership of his and Becker’s practice, with a ribbon cutting last Friday launching a rebranding of the practice. As for his family life, his wife, Roxanne, gave birth to their first child, a daughter, Illiana, two months ago.
Nevertheless, the ebullient Durkin is committed to making time for the new affiliation with McGuire.
“This is our major priority for 2013,” he says.
Durkin and Roxanne met McGuire through friends, then had haircuts and other services at Polished, McGuire’s second salon, this one on Cardinal Drive.
Roxanne Durkin had lunch with McGuire and instantly connected.
“We had met with other people, but we were afraid we would dilute some of our brand while strengthening theirs. But with Tanja, we felt she had an incredibly strong product. She doesn’t offer gimmicky stuff. She does her due diligence before she offers it.
“It seemed to me she was doing the exact same thing we were trying to do, just on a different playing field. We’re on the medical side, and she’s doing it on the services side. Her staff is incredible. Just as good as ours – we hope.”
Durkin says he just hired a physician’s assistant, Bonnie Martin, to help with A Pampered Life.
McGuire’s combined businesses employ 30 people, 29 women and one man.
With so many women serving so many other women, she has implemented has a strict no-gossip policy.
“We let our customers vent. But it stops there,” she says.
Polished opened in 2009. With a mini-hair salon on one side, and pedicure and manicure stations on the other, it has been a striking success, marketed heavily by McGuire with evening get-togethers.
It is now a staple of pre-wedding bridesmaids needing strippy-sandal pedicures, and hosts birthday parties for both grown women and little girls.
With a retail boutique area masking the salon services from the street view, Polished expects to do 1,500 manicures and pedicures in November and December alone, McGuire says.
A Pampered Life has delivered 2,500 spa services this year, she says.
McGuire has a separate spa management company that runs the spa at the Disney Resort. It opened in October 2010.
