PARIS – If the past couple snowstorms have you wishing for summer already, Mellissa Atkisson can you offer you some sunshine, even if it is artificial.
The former stay-at-home mom from Norway is now busy running Sun-Raze Tanning Salon with her business partner, Eddie Knox. The salon at 130 Main St. in South Paris opened in July and welcomes walk-in customers as well as appointments.
After giving birth to her son Bryce, 1, who accompanies her to work every day, Atkisson became antsy to stake a claim in the small-business community that makes up much of the economic base in Paris.
“I thought, I would like to open my own business,” she said Friday. “On my side of the family and my husband’s, there was always someone in the family who had their own business.”
A friend’s mother who runs a tanning salon in Windham is doing “extremely well,” Atkisson said, which gave her the idea to follow a good example. But first she had to convince her husband, Jay.
“I had to pitch it to my husband he was like my bank. I had to convince him that it would do well,” she said.
Jay’s best friend, Eddie Knox, decided to join in. “He loves to get involved in any business opportunity,” she said.
They found store space they could rent, which was formerly used by a cleaning business, and Sun-Raze was born. Atkisson said she did plenty of online research to learn about indoor tanning and its benefits and risks.
The salon has three tanning booths and offers a line of various tanning products. Atkisson said business has picked up the past several weeks, and she expects even more of an increase after Christmas, when people aren’t so caught up in the holiday rush.
Her clientele so far has been both men and women, and people with upcoming weddings come in together so the bride and groom don’t have starkly different skin tones, a strategy Atkisson employed for her own wedding.
Her husband works outdoors in construction and tans easily. “I had to tan just to catch up so I wouldn’t look like a ghost next to him,” she said.
People also use her booths to get a base tan before departing on a vacation in a sunny destination. “People don’t want to have a miserable time because they’ve burnt their skin to a crisp,” she said.
The lamps in the booths, referred to as VHR (very high reflector) technology, have a very high output of 160 watts or more and special built-in reflectors. Atkisson said a customer typically tans for no more than five minutes at a time, and she doesn’t allow customers to use a tanning booth more than once per day.
Although the dangers of sun exposure are well-publicized, tans are still popular, and Atkisson said her booth supplier told her that tanning booths are no different than being outside in natural sunshine.
Plus, there is one healthy benefit: The light in tanning booths produces Vitamin D in the body, just like natural sun.
Anyone wishing to make an appointment at Sun-Raze may phone 739-2796.
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