Author's Note: This piece is a profile I wrote about Amy Ling Lin a couple of years before COVID-19.
On October 2017, my colleague Evelyn invited me to a barbecue at her apartment in Chelsea. The party was filled with Columbia MBA graduates, as Evelyn is one herself. Every alum there had a great background on paper – the room was filled with investment bankers, marketing leaders, and the like. However, none of them stood out as much as Amy Ling Lin, at least to me.
Amy was a petite Chinese immigrant in her early 30s, with short hair in a blunt cut dyed light brown. She was dressed in neutral colors, white and beige, yet her clothes’ simplicity added to her stylish look. What drew me to her most was her warm, welcoming smile, and the fact that she lacked any snobbery or detachment in her attitude. She spoke in a low, quiet tone, yet she stated each word with confidence.
That evening Amy told me that she was the Founder and CEO of Sundays Studios, a nontoxic nail salon business focused on wellness and meditation. I actually recognized the name of her company when she told me about it. On my daily walks from my office in the Flatiron District to my apartment in Kips Bay, I would pass a beautiful salon with the sign “Sundays Nontoxic Nail Studio” in fluorescent lights. I remembered peering into the nail studio once in a while, and I had wanted to try their service but never got the chance. The word “nontoxic” had especially jumped out at me and made me wonder if toxicity was an issue at other salons.
Her Columbia MBA degree helped Amy launch this company. She had two nail studios, one in NoMad (the one I regularly walked by) and another within Saks Fifth Avenue in the Financial District. As Amy humbly described her company to me, Evelyn interrupted and mentioned how notable Amy actually was – her studios were featured in The New York Times and Vogue and other reputable publications.
In mid-April 2018, I met up with Amy for the second time to interview her, since I wanted to know more about her as a person, what motivated her, and what inspired her. We met at her NoMad nail salon, so I decided to get a gel manicure while I was there. Like Amy’s outfit the night I met her, the studio looked chic and was mostly beige and white. Unlike most nail salons where the workers wore drab outfits that resembled hospital scrubs, the employees wore pale pink and comfortable-looking cotton cardigans.
As I was getting my nails done by Zoey, one of the studio’s talented nail artists, Amy tapped me on the shoulder and greeted me. She had a warm smile, just like she did when I met her at the barbecue. “What color did you choose?’ she curiously asked.
“Beige,” I sighed as Zoey painted my nails. “I have meetings with conservative companies this week, which is why I ended up choosing this color. Usually I like wearing bold colors, like black polish.”
“I actually love beige-colored nails,” Amy responded, laughing. “But you should wear the colors that you like going forward!”
After my relaxing nail service was finished, Amy and I walked up a winding staircase to the salon’s second level so that I could conduct the interview with her. I asked her first, what had inspired her to launch this awesome business? Since I have always worked for large corporations, starting a company seemed a very brave thing to do.
Amy’s constant inspiration was her father, who had started a business selling tea back where she had grown up in a small town near Fujian, China. When she was seven, her dad’s business failed, and he then moved to NYC. In his earlier years in NYC, he washed dishes for only 500 dollars a month, and now he owned his own Chinese takeout restaurant. Because she had seen her father fail and pick himself back up, she was never afraid of taking risks or experiencing failure.
In her 20’s, Amy moved from Fujian to New York. While she worked for fashion and retail companies, she found that the corporate work life wasn’t satisfying to her. She always felt like something was missing. With her father’s entrepreneurial background as an inspiration, Amy decided to try launching her own business. One day while she was randomly chatting with her friends about the many problems in the nail business, an idea came to her – she thought that she could start her own nail salon and make a difference in the industry.
In 2011 while she still worked full-time, she enrolled in the American Beauty School to learn how to do nails in her spare time. By 2012, she started a corner nail salon in the Upper West Side called Lilac NYC. She hired manicurists who had worked in the industry for years.
While running her first company, she found herself asking questions. Why did nail technicians spray customers’ fingers with “sanitizing” chemicals, which didn’t actually include ingredients that cleaned people’s hands? Why did certain nail products contain TPHP, which could affect female hormones and negatively impact reproductive health? She discovered that there were many things that occurred in the nail industry which no one questioned, since a lot of salon owners didn’t go to college. “They kind of just did what they did at the last salon,” she recalled.
While she attended Columbia Business School in 2015, she thought about starting a new nail company which only used non-toxic, animal cruelty-free, and vegan ingredients. Sundays Studios was launched in 2016. At her salons, the manicurists painted customers’ nails with Amy’s own line of nail polish.
Like all of us, Amy has had moments when she doubted herself and thought that she may have taken the wrong path. People would ask her, “You went to Columbia Business School and just ended up opening a nail salon?” Perhaps if she’d have launched a tech start-up, she’d have found it easier to get venture capital funds.
Eventually, she learned that it was important to just be truthful to herself and to not worry about how others perceived her. She realized that she shouldn’t work for a reputable organization or start a tech company just because that’s what people approved of. She loved working at a nail salon, so why not do it? Her clients were relaxed and happy, and so was she.
Amy’s acceptance of her true self initiated her to encourage her customers to embrace their own individuality. She noted that sometimes the fashion world dictated what society should prefer, but she aimed to motivate people to bring out their own unique personalities. To do so, she offered people a wide range of nail color options in her studios, so that each person could pick a hue that matched their individual preferences. Moreover, in her company’s marketing photography, she showcased real clients’ nails rather than models’ nails, in an effort to encourage her customers to embrace their authentic selves. Finally, I put two and two together – her encouragement to highlight one’s individuality must have been why Amy had told me to pick a nail color that I preferred when I had gotten my nails done earlier that day, rather than a color that I thought that others would like. I had chosen a color to suit my “role,” not my true personality.
It was also always Amy’s goal to help her clients feel relaxed at her salons. For example, she offered her customers headphones with guided meditation recordings to listen to as they got their nails painted. Moreover, her studio had a beautiful design that emitted a welcoming feeling, influenced by Scandinavian interior design that she adored when she had travelled to Denmark. The inside of Danish houses were frequently decorated with warm, simple colors that made people feel at ease. This type of interior was exactly what Amy wanted for her studios, so that she could always make her customers feel at home. Additionally, the second floor of the salon was typically used for social gatherings such as book clubs and movie nights. These events reinforced what Sundays Studios strived to give people: positive influences on their lifestyles.
Amy’s dad had wanted her to become an immigration lawyer so that she could help immigrants. Although Amy didn’t follow this career path, her father influenced her to give back to immigrants in her own way – by providing the immigrant workers in her salons safe working conditions, free of toxic ingredients. “One day, if Sundays makes it big, I want to contribute as much as possible to philanthropy,” she told me with an earnest tone. By the way she emphasized this statement, I could tell that giving back is her ultimate hope and vision.
I felt confident that Amy will continue to be an inspiration to immigrants, aspiring business leaders, and everyone that she crossed paths with, like her father was an inspiration to her. I asked her what advice she’d give to other entrepreneurs dreaming of launching their own companies. “There’s a saying that goes, ‘Businesses never fail but founders give up,’” she told me. She stated that people had always told her that they felt it wasn’t the right time to launch a business, but she encouraged them to just go for it if they wanted to. She advised that they should find out problems along the way and solve them then, instead of worrying about all the possible hurdles in advance. As an example, she had started in the nail industry several years ago, but she was still learning every day while running her company.
As we finished our conversation and walked down the steps on my way out, I asked her one final question: “By the way, why the name Sundays?” Incidentally, it was a Sunday, which was cute – I got my nails done at Sundays, on a Sunday.
Amy smiled as she remembered, “I came up with the name of the company on a Sunday morning. Sunday is a day to relax, yet you’re still planning what you’ll be doing for the upcoming week. So you’re consciously using your time to relax, which is what I’d love my clients to do here.”
Before I headed out, the receptionist gave me a small, beige-colored square card to keep in my wallet. The card said, “Self-care is self-love. Even the small things in our daily lives matter.” I could hear Amy’s voice saying those words in my head, as I read them. I hoped that in the future, Amy will influence many more people to take care of themselves by taking small moments to relax, and by loving and embracing their unique personalities.