Meet Alexa Faye
If you know her as Alexa Faye, you probably know the brows.
You might know the beauty recommendations, the fashion, the jewelry, the perfectly curated content or the personality behind it all.
What you may not know is that Alexa Faye is actually Alexa Kelly — and the businesswoman behind the beauty has been building, experimenting and figuring things out for a lot longer than Instagram might suggest.
Her first entrepreneurial venture? Going door-to-door as a kid offering to walk the neighborhood dogs. She ended up with about ten clients.
From there, her résumé took a few turns. Retail. Car sales. Piercing in a tattoo shop. Cosmetology school. And eventually, the thing that would change everything: eyebrows.
About ten years ago, Alexa had her own brows microbladed while attending cosmetology school and became obsessed with the process. She took a class, started practicing on classmates and slowly turned what began as curiosity into a career.
Today, she jokingly tells people, “Oh, I just do brows.”
But Alexa has built something much bigger than that.
She is an artist, entrepreneur, employer, beauty expert and content creator who has built her career around helping women feel more confident in themselves.
Beauty Was the Vehicle. Confidence Was Always the Mission.
Alexa's love of beauty started long before her business.
One of her earliest memories is receiving a makeup kit from her grandmother — a seemingly simple gift that helped spark a lifelong fascination with beauty, creativity and femininity.
But her grandmother gave her something even more important.
Belief.
Throughout Alexa's life, her grandmother has repeatedly reminded her that she would be okay and that she lived a "charmed life." Alexa credits that unwavering belief with helping her develop the confidence to have big aspirations of her own.
Beauty eventually became the vehicle through which she could give that same feeling to other women.
Whether she's creating brows, sharing beauty secrets online or simply listening to someone sitting in her chair, the underlying goal is remarkably consistent:
Help women feel good about themselves.
Being Underestimated Became an Advantage
Building a business in the beauty industry hasn't always meant being taken seriously.
Alexa remembers feeling as though she constantly had to defend beauty as a legitimate industry — particularly when dealing with the decidedly less glamorous parts of entrepreneurship: finances, contracts, leases, negotiations and paperwork.
But somewhere along the way, her perspective changed.
Instead of resenting being underestimated, she learned to use it.
Do your homework. Know your numbers. Read the paperwork. Ask questions.
Walk into the room prepared.
The women Alexa knows in beauty aren't simply doing hair, brows, makeup or aesthetics. They're simultaneously artists, marketers, salespeople, customer-service departments, entrepreneurs and CEOs.
As Alexa puts it: “No baby, we WORK — and we make money.”
Success Doesn't Have to Mean Hustling All the Time
Alexa's philosophy around success has evolved, too.
There was a time when she equated success with constantly doing more.
Not anymore.
Some days, she admits, she isn't motivated. And rather than treating that as failure, she has learned that sometimes what she genuinely needs is an off day.
There are other days when discipline has to take over.
Having two employees has changed that equation for her. They took a chance on her and her business, and Alexa feels a responsibility to create opportunities for them — even when that means showing up on the days she doesn't necessarily feel like it.
And there is one additional source of motivation.
“I also really love to shop,” she jokes. “Sometimes mama just needs to make some money.”
For Alexa, sustainable ambition now lives somewhere between grace and grit: knowing when to rest, knowing when to work and remembering who and what you're working for.
Don't Get Ahead of Yourself
Perhaps the biggest lesson entrepreneurship has taught her is surprisingly simple:
Don't get ahead of yourself.
Social media makes it remarkably easy to measure your beginning against someone else's middle.
The bigger space. The nicer things. The next opportunity. The business that appears to be growing faster.
Alexa has learned that trying to look successful can sometimes interfere with actually building something successful.
Her philosophy now?
Dream ten steps ahead while remaining responsible for the step you're standing on.
“Focus on what you can do well right now. Build from there. Your time will come.”
Women in Women's Corners
Ask Alexa how she supports other women and her answer is immediate:
“I'm there for them.”
Sometimes that means squeezing in a woman preparing to begin chemotherapy because she wants her brows done before treatment.
Sometimes it's listening to someone sitting in her chair.
Sometimes it's coffee with a woman who has an idea she's afraid to pursue.
And sometimes it's simply making an introduction.
Alexa doesn't believe another woman's success diminishes her own. If she knows something that could help someone, she'll share it. If she knows two women who should meet, she'll connect them.
That philosophy also inspired Still Her, an experience Alexa created for women going through or who have gone through cancer treatment. Its purpose is bigger than beauty: to remind women that beneath everything cancer may change or take away, you are still her.
And perhaps that's Alexa's story in a sentence. Beauty may be what brought women into her chair. Making them feel seen is what has kept her there.
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