When asked what she loves most about her job, Devoted Creations International Sales and Education Manager Lisa Parsons keeps it real. Of course she loves building relationships with hundreds of salon owners and employees each year and helping improve skin care worldwide, but her favorite thing? She just really loves helping people make more money. From the sales person racking up more commission, to the owners that generate more revenue from product sales, that’s what Lisa does. In this Smart Tan exclusive interview, she discusses how she accomplishes that objective, new and upcoming Devoted Creations products and much more.

How are you continuing to improve your education and training for salons?

What I really like is our new interactive training center. We built a full interactive training center in our office. It’s a full tanning salon with webcam and portal. It makes it really easy for me to do customer one-on-one trainings with salons the next day. Normally we fly to the salons, but if somebody needs a quick refresher or hires new employees or we just can’t get to them in time, it’s just like in the store but online. We’re the first manufacturer to do this. Most do webinars, but with ours, you’re seeing a live person, and you interact with us. So I feel like we’ve differentiated ourselves with a wide range of training options. We still to in-salon trainings, but this makes us more accessible. It kind of removes the whole weight of trying to schedule training. You can schedule that just by calling our office.

What are you doing to keep your product lines fresh?

We are launching four mid-season products this year. We usually do at least one mid-season launch. This year, because of the excitement of out current lineup, we decided to do four.

In our Devoted Creations line, we have Black Tulip. It’s inspired by our trip to the Netherlands to do a speaking engagement at our distributor there. We fell in love with the country, and they’re very famous for tulips. I bought this special black tulip there, and it was really cool. We just tried to do something that hit a little bit closer to home. It’s such a rare flower, and we tried to emulate the idea of a very rare dark color. It’s a very dark bronzer. Moderate pricing.

For Ed Hardy, we did a product called Bahama Bronzer. It’s in the Tanovations line… old-school tanning is how we like to describe it. It’s what was popular back in the early ‘90s: fruity, outsdoorsy, beachy. Caribbean Cool was a great name, then Tahitian Bronze. The newest one is Bahama Bronzer. It’s not super crazy dark, reasonable price and old-school look.

The newest we’re most excited about is Devoted Creations Always Desired in the Color Rush collection. Basically, we launched two products in the Color Rush collection. One was a extremely dark bronzer. Then we did a pure accelerator with no bronzer that has mattifying properties and liquid glass. Both those products were popular, so we decided to combine them and do a dark bronzer with the charcoal extract and the liquid glass. It also has contouring properties too. It’s very girly, looks like it has diamonds on the outside with a big black bow.

Spa Fusion is our line that is a little unique. It’s more of just a skin care and moisturizing collection. Instead of traditional moisturizers, this uses three different agents: hemp seed oil, Aloe Vera gel and soothing cocoa butter. It is Aloe Vera based where as most use water base. The Original Moisturizer has been so popular that we decided to do a mid-season called Sweet Pomegranate. It retails at only $22.

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