With 23 years in the beauty industry, Chantelle Hartshorne has painted herself a wildly successful career as a makeup artist. Today, a leader of StyleBee Inc., a beauty company that distributes hair and makeup professionals to their clients’ door, at the click of a button, Chantelle is committed to advancing the lives of freelance beauty professionals everywhere. Having been part of the tight-knit MUA community since the dawn of the dot-com age, Chantelle’s journey from freelance artist to leader of the endeavor toward better working conditions in the industry is the result of the many pixels that make up the bigger picture of her life.
Chantelle grew up on Vancouver Island, Canada with parents who owned a specialized logging business and a brother who prided himself as the pioneer of their loving family. She started her career in Montreal, working as a makeup artist for one of the largest retail makeup brands in the world. Although she had branched out into freelance gigs with clients she met at the retail counter, Chantelle soon realized that her journey as an artist had reached as far as it could within the borders of Canada.
Thankfully, her brother was an extremely successful tech genius who loved his sister. He offered to send Chantelle to school anywhere in the world. Next thing she knew, she was far from home and had started a degree in Photography from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, along with Optional Practical Training as an international student and makeup artist.
At this point, she had already built a diverse corporate portfolio from her clients in Montreal. With pictures taken by her best friend, a renowned headshot photographer, and a sophisticated personal website built by her brother, her Photography degree was the cherry on top of an already-established career that she was ready to capitalize on in the US. So, she founded Chantelle Studio, to cement her place as a leading artist in California.
There still remained one problem, however. She had one year to prove to herself that she was an individual of extraordinary ability. Chantelle recalls, “My brother supported me throughout my journey, so there was no way I would ever let him down.” A year later, she was finishing her work glamming up renowned people.
It was 2014, and Chantelle’s flourishing career had reached a pivotal moment. Once she partnered with an online business directory, Chantelle Studio became flooded with new clients, and she started to build a sweeping client list as a small business owner. Chantelle Studio was producing a steady income as one of the most successful independent makeup studios in the region.
Much of its success with corporate clientele was because Chantelle had her own online portfolio, licenses, a secure payment method, and business insurance policies to boast. These were invaluable assets that most other MUAs lacked as freelancers. Not only did it stop high-paying corporate clients from finding unlicensed MUAs through the internet, but it also prevented artists from increasing their financial worth past competitive pricing.
Makeup artists are alienated gig workers who often have nothing to fall back on in case of a slow day, and Chantelle would have been no different without her extensive support system of family and friends. “I am not a self-made woman. If I didn’t have my family and the opportunities my privileged position granted me, none of this could have ever happened,” she says.
But her story isn’t over yet. Chantelle Studios had made $250,000 in its first year when she first heard of StyleBee Inc. While maintaining her beauty services at Chantelle Studios, she started working as a makeup artist on StyleBee, a platform built for those who would love a blowout in the middle of the night without the exorbitant price tag. A company bursting with potential at the time, Chantelle leveraged her business acumen, affinity for sales, and 40,000-strong client list to StyleBee’s leadership—for free. All she asked for in return was equity. So, they offered her the role of Creative Director and Founding Member.
As someone with long and storied experience within the frequently informal economy of the beauty industry, Chantelle—as its Creative Director—looked at StyleBee’s operations at the time and wondered how to optimize the relationship between its clients and artists. Forever grateful for the resources and opportunities her career and support system afforded her, Chantelle took all the pieces she was provided to make what she calls an ‘economic kintsugi.’
“The original concept was to fill the gaps artists had in their schedules for extremely competitively priced beauty services. But all makeup artists want is a regular schedule. All they want are the big gigs like full-day photoshoots, day events, and weddings. That’s what we want,” Chantelle notes. The next logical step with the information at hand was to build a wedding pipeline into the platform. StyleBee’s specialized new offerings enabled it to expand both its clientele and its artist registry. Chantelle’s intimate knowledge of the industry as an MUA herself was proving to be more than priceless.
As Chantelle was juggling both her luxury studio and her transformative work at StyleBee, she was able to stay afloat when the 2020 pandemic hit the nation. Once the lockdowns were lifted in 2021, her life returned to pace quickly. Then, it started accelerating. She started getting client inquiries through Chantelle Studio like never before, as there was now an influx of people who had restrained their self-care urges throughout the pandemic. Simultaneously, StyleBee was now at the risk of dissolving. So, Chantelle joined hands with the Director of Operations, Natasha Reuter, and took charge of StyleBee to keep it alive.
As part of StyleBee’s leadership today, Chantelle and her crew are preparing to revolutionize its processes to further support its 5000 artists for sustained success amidst the cutthroat world of the beauty industry. As StyleBee finesses the final details of a complete overhaul of the traditional gig model, Chantelle remains dedicated to repaying her prosperity as a successful makeup artist to the MUA community in kind.
She concludes, “The problem is so easy to solve if you’ve seen and experienced it from the inside out. The changes we have instituted are an amalgamation of every lesson I’ve learned in the last two decades. It is like I said: I am not doing anything that does not already exist. There is no reinventing the wheel here. All I am doing is giving the bodies that help build the billionaires a seat at the table.”
Source: From Freelance Makeup Artist to Revolutionizing the Beauty Industry
