Side Hustle and Business Tips from LA-BEK

How to Have a Successful Nail Business

If you have ever considered a nail, beauty or any side hustle, this interview is for you!

Laura Wattie and Rebekah Drew, co-founders of LA-BEK. Mornington, Victoria share incredile advice and experience.

What is your side hustle?

We’re LA-BEK, an Australian gel nail wrap brand. We sell salon-style manicures you apply at home in about ten to fifteen minutes, with no salon appointment and no drying time.

There are two ranges. Our semi-cured wraps cure under a small UV or LED lamp and last two weeks or more.

Our UV-Free range needs no lamp at all, which means you can do your nails on the couch, at your desk, or in a caravan in the middle of nowhere. Both come off without acetone.

Everything is vegan and cruelty-free, and the UV-Free range is HEMA-free and TPO-free.

Why did you want to have a side hustle?

We had worked together as designers in Laura’s agency for nine years before LA-BEK existed.

Then we had babies a year apart. Laura had twins, Bek had her second.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, Bek realised she didn’t have the time or the money to get her nails done any more, and it was something she had always loved doing.

It sounds like a small thing to give up. It didn’t feel small. It was the one hour that had been hers.

So she went looking for a way to do it properly at home instead.

How did you decide this was the right one for you?

Bek tried everything first. Powders, polishes, all of them promising quick and easy, all of them delivering a mess on the kitchen bench and chips after two days.

Then she found semi-cured gel nail technology, and it actually worked. She was so impressed she showed Laura, and then she showed every woman in the office, and they were all hooked.

That was the moment we knew.

If a room full of busy women all wanted this the second they saw it, there were a lot more women out there in exactly the same position.

They loved a good manicure and simply couldn’t find the time or the money for it any more. We decided we’d be the ones to get it into their hands.

How long have you been doing it?

We started in March 2024, both still working full time. It was late nights and weekends for a long stretch.

By November 2025, it had gone from a side hustle to the main hustle. Laura sold her design agency and we went all in.

What did you need to get started?

We put in $5,000 each, so $10,000 all up. That covered our first run of stock and the packaging.

Everything else we did ourselves.

We built the website, did the branding, designed all the packaging, set up the social accounts and wrote our first email campaigns.

Having a design background between us meant we weren’t paying anyone to do any of that, which is the only reason $10,000 was enough to start.

If we’d had to outsource the branding and the website, we’d have needed a lot more than $10,000.

What have you needed to help it grow?

The biggest learning curve by far was marketing.

We were confident on the design and technical side, that was our background. We had no idea how big a job it would be to actually market a business.

Bek taught herself Meta ads and Google ads from scratch.

It’s taken two and a half years to really understand how paid marketing works: what makes a good ad, how to manage a budget, and how to produce content at the rate it demands.

We also moved the store from WordPress to Shopify in June this year, which is one of the best things we’ve done for the business.

And we doubled down on email. Three campaigns a week plus our automated flows, and email and SMS together now bring in around 30% of our revenue.

How much time do you spend on it?

In the beginning it’s every spare hour you have, which isn’t many between work and family life. You have to be prepared to give up your nights and your weekends.

Now that we’re both on LA-BEK full time and we’ve found our rhythm, it’s four days a week.

Or at least we try to keep it to four days.

When you’ve built something from scratch you’re so invested that you want to be working on it, even when you really should be taking a break.

How much money do you make per month or year (on average)?

LA-BEK has grown steadily every year we’ve been running.

Our last six months have been our strongest six months, and last month was our biggest month in the past year.

It started as something we did around our kids and it now supports itself and us properly.

What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome those?

Thinking a side hustle would be easy money.

It absolutely is not.

You work for every cent. It has been one of the hardest things we’ve ever done and also one of the most rewarding.

There were plenty of moments where we wondered whether all the work was worth it, or felt like it wasn’t going anywhere.

What got us through was buckling down and looking at what the numbers were telling us.

Knowing your finances is everything.

Your average order value, your conversion rate, what your marketing is actually returning, how much of your revenue comes from email and SMS.

Once you know your numbers you can see which lever to pull.

Email only bringing in 10%? Ramp it up.

Average order value too low to make a profit after shipping? Add upsells at the cart, build bundles, introduce a free shipping threshold.

Website not converting? Check the speed, check whether it’s genuinely easy to use, look at moving platforms.

You have to get really granular, but it’s the only way to know what’s worth working on.

What have been your biggest achievements or happy moments through your journey?

The best part has been having each other through it. We can’t imagine having survived the ups and downs of building a business on our own.

And we’ve built a real, profitable business that we both love.

After two and a half years of hard work, we have the flexibility to pick our kids up from school, or take a day off to go and do reading in the classroom. It’s magical.

What advice do you have for someone considering this as a side hustle?

There is no such thing as a side hustle. It will take all your spare time, so go into it knowing that.

Find a partner if you can.

We can’t imagine having done this on our own, and having someone to share the decisions and the doubt with has been worth more than any skill either of us brought to it.

And whatever you think the hard part will be, it probably isn’t.

We’re designers. We could build the website, do the branding, shoot the product.

The hard part turned out to be marketing and we didn’t see it coming.

Work out where your gap is early and start learning it before you need it.

We started with an advantage in tech and design skills, and we still stumbled and had to learn new ones.

Embrace the parts you don’t feel comfortable with.

There are so many resources out there now that you can teach yourself anything.

What are your future plans?

We have exciting new products launching over the next few months, and we’re currently searching for a warehouse space to move into, as we’ve outgrown our little office.