What is Ziba Beauty? The Story Behind The Business
To answer this, one must first ask: What is beauty? What is that indefinable magnetism illuminating the spirit of each individual and where does that vague sparkle of the human jewel gain its brilliance?
Why has the exoticism of the Far East (Persia, India and the Orient) held such sway over the Western world for centuries?
At Ziba Beauty, we know the answers and hold the keys to unlocking the mysteries of the ages. We have bundled the culture and authentic traditions of the East to bring select beauty services to the United States; including The Art of Threading® , an ancient form of hair removal and eyebrow shaping, and The Art of Mehndi® – a temporary art form applied for celebrations and good fortune.
In Eastern cultures, it is widely believed the eyes and brows are the keys to bringing out each person’s inner beauty and accentuating the uniqueness of every individual.
So to answer the ultimate question, what is Ziba Beauty?
Ziba Beauty is a chain of beauty studios that specializes in The Art of Threading® & body artistry with The Art of Mehndi® .
With 14 locations throughout California, Ziba Beauty studios provide an unmet need in the beauty industry by bringing Authentic Eastern beauty service techniques to the United States. These services are virtually pain-free, giving Western women a better option for hair removal with benefits far greater than tweezing and waxing.
Each year, 15.6 million people actively seek brow shaping services in the United States. Ziba Beauty shapes over One million eyebrows per year, through its busy California Studios.
At Ziba Beauty, we specialize in The Art of Threading®, an ancient street art form of hair removal and eyebrow shaping. We also offer The Art of Mehndi®, a traditional art form of painting temporary tattoos with natural henna paste.
Traditionally the hands and feet are painted for celebrations and are meant to bring the wearer good fortune. In addition, Ziba Beauty offers the Art of Waxing with the use of a natural Wax made exclusively for Ziba Beauty, and a unique proprietary product line called Sumita Beauty.
Ziba Beauty made a name for itself, extending its The Art of Threading® and The Art of Mehndi® services to some of the most well-known A-listers in Hollywood. Madonna, Liv Tyler, and many other celebrities use Ziba Beauty for magazine shoots, concerts, and music videos.
Ziba Beauty’s work has been on the cover of Elle, Rolling Stone, and other popular publications, propelling it to the forefront of lasting beauty trends.
Nearly 1 in 10 women spend money on facial hair removal, especially eyebrow shaping. With more than 156 million women in the United States, the market for Ziba Beauty’s service is enormous.
The Art of Threading® is the leading option for hair removal – it is less expensive, less painful, doesn’t cause wrinkles and produces a more defined eyebrow than tweezing or waxing.
The Art of Threading® isn’t just for women – it is popular with everyone, including men, who want facial hair removed or eyebrows shaped. Once people learn about threading and try it, they are hooked.
In the U.S., you’ll see threading shops in ethnic areas and public kiosks in some B- and C-level malls. Ziba Beauty is different – it uses stylish, upscale beauty studios staffed by highly trained and experienced beauty artists. Clients get a much more private and thoughtful approach to eyebrow threading with Ziba.
During the studios’ busy hours, it’s not uncommon for women to wait in line for hours to get an appointment with their favorite beauty artist. Best of all, they keep coming back every two to three weeks to maintain the shape.
American women don’t give much thought to where nail polish originated – it is so common today that we don’t think of what country or region made it popular. In fact, the practice originated in China and is another favored Eastern beauty tradition.
The Art of Threading® is similar – it has so many advantages that it is only a matter of time before it becomes the standard process of hair removal.
Fifteen-year-old Kundan Sarbarwal skipped along her neighborhood street in Iran when something caught her eye. What are they doing? she asked herself.
Drawing closer to her neighbor’s window, she saw one woman with a long, white thread wrapped into a double strand around her fingers. The neighbor bent over another woman’s face, running the thread along her eyebrow. She later learned they were taking part in a centuries-old Far Eastern beauty tradition called threading.
The Art of Threading: More than Tradition
Even as a girl, Sabarwal could sense that shaping the eyebrows not only accentuated the eyes, the windows to the soul but revealed inner beauty. “Naturally, everybody is beautiful,” she said recently, “and your inner beauty has to reflect on your face.”
As she reached adulthood, Sabarwal yearned to open a business that would satisfy her passion and allow her to earn a living. Forced to relocate her family from Iran to India in the 1970s to avoid the political turmoil of the time, she began threading eyebrows inside her tiny garage.
A steady stream of neighborhood women began to stop by, sitting inside the makeshift salon to get their eyebrows threaded twice a month. They loved the result so much they kept coming back. “After I threaded their eyebrows, their faces would begin to glow,” she said. “I’ve had women jump up and down, thanking me for bringing out their beauty.”
In 1988, the mother and two daughters brought a little piece of India to Southern California when they opened Ziba Beauty, a modest, 400-square-foot salon tucked inside a strip mall in Los Angeles’ Little India. Sabarwal used savings and a credit card to open the salon, scraping together about $4,000 to launch the business.
The family scrubbed the floors, hand-painted the storefront sign, and decorated in preparation for the grand opening. At that time, little was known about the virtually painless hair removal option; most women in the U.S. had grown accustomed to the pain of waxing and tweezing unwanted hair.
The shop was an instant success. Just like in India, women came in and kept coming back. The shop thrived and the family prospered. An unexpected trend quickly developed: non-Asian women started coming in to get their eyebrows shaped. Caucasian women, African American women, and even some men started showing up, having heard about this new, Far East alternative to waxing that offered a much more beautiful eyebrow, at a lower cost.
Soon, word spread about Ziba Beauty. The original location attracted 10,000 clients, including some celebrities, to the store each month. To meet high demand, the family began to expand and grew organically to six locations, some in malls and shopping centers.
Their list of services expanded, too, to include waxing, The Art of Mehndi® — a traditional Indian, non-permanent body art — and bridal services. As a testament to their quality services, Ziba Beauty found itself at the forefront of the beauty industry. Just like food and clothing, once-obscure ethnic traditions became popular the world over and Ziba Beauty was the right company at the right time.
When Sumita Batra took over as CEO from her mother, she began an aggressive expansion. Ziba grew from six locations to 16 in a short period, opening modern-designed studios in affluent shopping malls.
The studios attracted a wider range of clients – many trying threading for the first time. Ziba Beauty is a company on the move – as threading becomes more in demand throughout the United States, Ziba Beauty is the brand people will turn to and trust.
So what does the word “Ziba” mean?
It’s Farsi (persian) for “beautiful.” Beauty is at the core of what we do; we believe everyone has it, and our services help bring it out. In Eastern culture, the eyes and eyebrows are the keys to uncovering the beauty from within.
Our services highlight the distinctiveness of each of our clients, bringing out the most important feature on the face using centuries-old Far East beauty customs. Ziba Beauty offers consistent, high-quality services that are unavailable anywhere else. Ziba is the only salon brand in the world that offers a curriculum for The Art of Threading® and The Art of Mehndi®; we require all of our beauty artists to enroll in the Ziba Beauty Academy and complete the curriculum.
In the academy, each employee studies facial structures and learns which eyebrow shape works best with each face. Once our beauty artists finish these courses, they’re prepared to provide an unmatched level of service. “We don’t want eyebrow threading to stay a street art form.
We want it to be a professional service that can be widely used,” says our CEO, Sumita Batra. “We are like a cookbook that does not yet exist for street food.” Ziba Beauty sells its own line of high-end brow beauty products.
Among pictures and other mementos, a framed note sits on a curio cabinet inside Ziba Beauty headquarters in Artesia, Calif. The scrawling, bubbly handwriting takes up nearly all of the 8½- by-11-inch sheet’s white surface, thanking Ziba’s CEO, Sumita Batra. The writer? Madonna. It’s well known amongst our regular clients that Ziba Beauty is the most trusted source for Far East beauty traditions.
We also have a number of Hollywood A-listers who have come to know and love our brand. When Ziba Beauty opened in the 1980s in Los Angeles, we thought we would service Asian and Indian women.
We did and word spread. Eventually, we started attracting non-Asian friends of our clients, including influential people working in makeup and styling in the movie industry. A well-known stylist once wore Ziba Beauty Mehndi (Henna) to a party and started a trend.
High profile entertainers began adopting Asian beauty methods into their appearances. Perhaps you noticed the intricate Mehndi designs that actress Liv Tyler sported in a Vanity Fair photo spread in 1997.
That is Ziba’s first tear sheet! It’s one of our proudest moments. Word got out, and soon Madonna and Hilary Duff were coming into Ziba locations for Mehndi and glitter Mehndi. The Ziba Way quickly forged its path along the Hollywood Hills. Jennifer Aniston, Gwen Stefani, Salma Hayek, and Naomi Campbell are some of our favorite clients.
Tyra Banks’ America’s Next Top Model commissioned us to thread their models’ eyebrows for three seasons.
Success with so many famous people helped propel Ziba Beauty studios. Many clients tried Ziba after seeing The Art of Threading and The Art of Mehndi on the faces and hands of their favorite stars. Visit a Ziba Beauty studio and you’ll see photos of famous people showing off our work.