Today we’d like to introduce you to Cici DiOrio.
Hi Cici, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I started my business during the start of covid 19 pandemic, I was 16 and bored and needed some extra money. After salons closed, I made fake nail press-ons for my girlfriends and school girls. I charged $10 bucks for twenty nails, and my mother drove me around while I delivered them to mailboxes.
After a few months of this, a posted a video that went viral. 5 am on Sunday, November 22nd, I had 23,000 followers, the video had 130,000 likes, and it had 980,000 views. In my Instagram and TikTok bio, I linked a google form to sell nails. It was not an automated process. I called up my girlfriends, they came over and we wrote everything in notebooks by hand!
There were hundreds of people interested in buying nails and no website to buy from. We started messaging these people on messages, Instagram, Snapchat, or however they preferred to be contacted. My dining room wall was covered with post-it notes of orders as I worked for a month straight. During that time, I signed online for my classes remotely due to the pandemic. I painted nails from around 9 a.m. to 2 a.m that night. Many nights I spent working in the dark house while my family slept, except by the night of my lamp. By the first week of December, I had sent nails to every state in America at least twice, including Hawaii and Alaska. My friends would come over after classes ended or at lunch when there was enough time to drive to my house and log on to school. I would throw my friend Anna $50 and tell her to pick up some pizzas for dinner on her way over as she was the only one with a license. We were juniors in high school, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing and as the owner, I had no idea what to do, but we made it work and that made every single day enticing.
My business boomed overnight, and I am so thankful that I have only gone up since then. When May rolled around, I was shipping to Canada, and I started doing local craft and vendor shows in Pittsburgh in the summer.
In August of 2021, two weeks before my senior year of high school started, I signed a lease for my own section of a boutique in Lawrenceville called Boheme Pittsburgh, it is the cutest place with a whole bunch of creators and sellers from our own little corner of Pittsburgh and I’m so honored to be in with all of these incredible, colorful and funky creators.
Now that it is the fall of 2022, I am a freshman in college and I have moved to Burlington Vermont. I attend Champlain college for marketing, where I hope to continue to grow my business.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
No, it has not been easy. I opened my business at 16 years old, in the midst of a global pandemic, while still in high school. I was doing everything that society would tell me was the wrong thing to do. I was running a legal business before I was even a legal adult myself! Of course, I had people weary of what I was capable of. My presence on social media was either extraordinarily positive or incredibly negative. Often, people do not take me seriously because of my age. I find that it is when people are unsure of how old I am, is then when the feedback is positive. My biggest struggle is people believing they can scam me for my products, which usually come from customers my age. it’s disheartening considering My goal is to inspire other young women and young people to follow their hearts no matter their age and no matter what their dream is.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I pride myself on creating nail sets that usually are 1 of 1, love all things unique, even as extreme as it sounds, I try not to duplicate sets exactly. Whether its charms, hand-painted art or even the packaging. I love that with each set comes a personality. Remember as a kid when you went to the gas station and scrolled through the spinning shelves looking for your name on a cup or little tag, I try to create the same concept in the sense no matter what you choose, it’s a unique experience completely to you, and what you’re looking for. I always say it’s your world babe, I just make nails for it.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
Well, now that I am in college, I hope to continue to grow my company with my degree. In the next five years, I would love to be shipping on a global scale. I would also love to have a space to be created in a professional studio where I could maybe also sell products out of the front while working in the back. Now having said that, that means setting down in one city, and as of right now, I’m okay moving from place to place until I find the perfect City for Cici’s Nails!
Pricing:
- Simple designs, like a short French tip 20 piece set is usually $30
- More detailed medium-length sets can range from $40 to $65 typically.
- More extreme medium and long length sets are mostly marked between $55 to $80
- XL, up to custom created shaped sets typically start around $80 and usually go up from there based on design and products used
Contact Info:
- Website: https://cicisnails.fun/
- Instagram: @cicis.nails
- Facebook: @cicis.nails
- Other: tiktok: @cicis.nails
Image Credits
The nail photos are mine, the image of me was taken By Abbey Gleason from Wild Blue Studios in Pittsburgh PA
