Longtime Greenfield-based skin-care expert and esthetician Penny Stewart has moved her offices to Routes 5 and 10 in Deerfield.
“Back to the beginning, which I’m very happy about,” Stewart said about downsizing from her former business on Federal Street in Greenfield to a small, private office at the back of the Mill Village Professional Building. Her business, Penny Stewart/Esthetician, offers facials, waxing and eyelash extensions, among other skin-care services.
“At one time, I had as many as 15 employees,” she said while sitting at a desk in front of cases of stacked facial products,
Her new office is extremely private, tucked behind the office building and accessible only through a side door. Despite the obscurity of the office, her clients, who have followed her to the new location, haven’t had any trouble finding it, Stewart said.
“Basically, it’s just me all the time,” she said. Stewart likes the space and that it has a private entrance in the back.
“It’s all I need,” she said.
After graduating in 1981 from University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, Stewart worked in retail before attending a certificate program at Catherine Hinds Institute of Esthetics in Woburn in order to change careers. She also had to pass a few state licensing tests to become certified.
Soon after, as Stewart explains, “I started renting space in a friend’s salon” and started her own business, which grew exponentially over the decades.
But two years ago, desiring to lead a less stressful lifestyle, she put the Greenfield business on the market.
Around then, and while continuing to run her own business, Stewart began working as an esthetician at the Amherst office of Northampton-based Allcroft Facial Plastic Surgery.
Her own business in Greenfield sold on July 15. Within two weeks of closing on the deal, she had left the plastic surgeon’s office, found new office space, rented and remodeled, and founded a fresh business in time to open on Aug. 1.
“I thought that was the direction I wanted to go in, working for someone else,” she said about her initial decision to sell A New Face Skin Care and Bodyworks.
However, after her daughter found the space in Deerfield she couldn’t resist coming full circle and starting all over again.
Since moving, it’s been a seamless transition.
It hasn’t been difficult to get customers. After all, she already has all the equipment — and a large, loyal clientele.
You can reach Andy Castillo
at: acastillo@recorder.com
or 413-772-0261, ext. 263
On Twitter: @AndyCCastillo