BC Business
Lavoh is set to launch in May, and lucky customers could score two Taylor Swift tickets in the first 24 hours
Starting over is hard—especially for entrepreneurs like Eliza Trendiak, who spent 15 years in Vancouver’s salon industry. She is set to launch Lavoh, a reusable facecloth company, in May, but the decision to end her long career as a salon owner didn’t come easy.
Trendiak started working in hair care after she graduated from Vancouver beauty school Blanche Macdonald in 2010. She launched Artel Salon in 2015, saw it through the pandemic and expanded from one to four locations in Vancouver. But eight years and two babies later, she started to think she wasn’t enough.
“I just felt like I couldn’t give the business the time and attention that it needed, and I couldn’t give my kids the time and attention that they needed,” Trendiak explains. She started flirting with the idea of doing something different when the pressure to present herself as someone who had everything under control was becoming too much. “That was really weird for me,” she admits, “because who am I going to be without this title? You know, my community knows me as Eliza, the salon owner.”
Therapy helped. It made her realize that people build and sell businesses all the time, that just because she went to school for something and spent time establishing herself somewhere, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t find success in other ventures.
So after eight years in business, Trendiak sold her salon in 2023. But she couldn’t stop thinking about a problem that had been staring her in the face forever: waste.
“The beauty industry, we create a ton of waste,” says Trendiak. As a salon owner, she addressed that by joining Toronto-based environmental organization Green Circle Salon’s recycling program, which “cut down [Artel’s] waste by 95 percent, to the point where the only garbage we were creating were our lunches.”
Makeup, however, is a different story. More people are wearing makeup nowadays, the industry is booming, but “nobody is really looking at how we take it off our face,” says Trendiak. When she became a parent, her time for self-care decreased and her distaste for things like disposable makeup wipes increased. So when she finally found a reusable product that worked, she couldn’t stop raving about it—and that laid the foundation for her to start working on Lavoh.
“I felt like there was room in the market for me because the vast majority of people I talk to are still using disposable products,” says Trendiak. She designed a pillowy-soft facecloth that’s light, has a hanging hook and only requires water to use.
Whereas soap-based removers break down makeup through a chemical reaction, Lavoh’s sensitive-skin-friendly microfibre cloths cause a physical reaction with “millions of tiny little hairs that just kind of pulls the makeup off your face” (including waterproof stuff), Trendiak explains. They come in five colors and one $25 cloth can last for years, she adds.
Lavoh is set to launch this summer and Trendiak, an avid Swiftie, is also offering customers a chance to win two tickets to see Taylor Swift in Vancouver if they purchase a facecloth within the first 24 hours.
“I’m just having a lot of fun,” she says. “I heard this amazing quote that’s like, You’re never starting from scratch, you’re starting from experience. And I’m like, Oh yeah, I’ve got 15 years of business experience under my belt… so I’m not starting this business from scratch, I’m starting it with a lot of knowledge, plus I get to learn new things on top of that.”