Community Highlights: Meet Austin Gill of ElàMar

Today we’d like to introduce you to Austin Gill.

Hi Austin, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Like many businesses, ElàMar was born from the desire to create what we saw missing in the world. After countless treatments over the years, we found ourselves still looking for a place that understood that how we feel is as important to us as how we look. Because, although we mostly think of beauty as the way something or someone looks, beauty is also an experience.

It’s the awe and inspiration you get when you walk into a beautiful cathedral or see an extraordinary work of art. Beauty is a peace or harmony you sense when you enter a perfectly designed space. It’s the feeling you have when you’re confident about who you are and how you’re presenting yourself in the world.

This is the concept of beauty we want to share with people. ElàMar is unique because instead of simply helping people look pretty, we focus on helping people feel beautiful. That may sound like a trivial play on words, but to us, it’s a profound difference in the way we think about what we do. Two of our core principles demonstrate really well how we bring this to life.

The first principle is surprise, aesthetics. We want your outcome to be beautiful, yes, and we also want to create beautiful interiors, beautiful websites, beautiful treatment menus and print materials. Anything we put into the world should be aesthetically pleasing. If we’re going to be about beauty, shouldn’t we be about beauty in all things?

The second principle is hospitality. We want to infuse warmth, friendliness and generosity into every touchpoint we have with our guests. This affects large changes in how we practice, such as prioritizing the guest’s best interest over revenue, down to small things like being mindful of our emotional wake, to smiling when we greet someone, to the cheer in our voices when we answer the phone. Ultimately we want people to leave every encounter with us feeling better about themselves than before they arrived. So we like to say that we don’t just take care of skin; we take care of people.

“The best way to love someone is not to change them, but instead, help them reveal the greatest version of themselves.” Steve Maraboli

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?
Ha. Nothing that’s worthwhile ever is. This question brings to mind a quote by Dan Millman, “Every positive change – every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness – involves a rite of passage. Each time to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation. I have never found an exception”. I think this applies to business too. Our greatest struggle has been articulating our beliefs about the way aesthetics should be practiced, then figuring out how to infuse those beliefs into day-to-day tasks.

Our mission is to help people feel beautiful. Five words and it took years to articulate that! And then you have to figure out how to implement. Little things like beginning each treatment by asking the guest if they’d like to relax or chat or developing a note-taking system to keep track of guest’s activity to create a seamless experience from visit to visit take a lot of time to develop. On the other hand, even though these feel like struggles, they’re also what makes our job fun but challenging us to figure out how to be better and more authentic each day.

We’ve been impressed with ElàMar, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
ElàMar is a medical aesthetics boutique. We’re essentially a med spa, but we use the term boutique because it carries a sense of intimacy and specialization that we associate with. We specialize in non-surgical cosmetic treatments, such as botox, dermal fillers, laser skin resurfacing, microneedling, etc. The important thing is that non-surgical is all we do. Most of these treatments are offered by other specialties like plastic surgery and dermatology, but they are often an afterthought since they aren’t the core of the business. By focusing on a few things, we’re able to ensure that we’re only offering treatments that we believe in and that we perform them really well. We’re essentially forced to be good at what we do because we don’t have a fallback treatment.

Concerning the brand, the thing I’m most proud of is creating a business with a meaningful mission. It’s fulfilling to have a place to work with other like-minded people who believe in doing good in the world.

Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
I have to give credit to my parents, Marlin and Elaine Gill. They founded ElàMar and invited me to join a few years later. Most importantly, they taught me that appearance matters. That may sound superficial, but I’ve learned that your external environment is a by-product of your internal environment. There’s a saying that the body is the outermost layer of the mind. I just think that’s a beautiful idea, how working to organize your environment forces you to organize yourself – your emotions, your principles and your thoughts.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://elamarskin.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elamarskin/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elamarskin/