OUR HISTORY
18 YEARS (AND COUNTING) OF PUTTING IN THE WORK…
For 18 years, we built…
For 18 years, we encountered disappointments…
For 18 years, we faced challenges…
For 18 years, we broke new grounds and celebrated victories…
There were times of pain and times of joy…
Times of tears and times of laughter…
Times when we almost gave up and times when we felt like we were on top of the world…
The Spectra Beauté you see today didn’t get here overnight. It was built on the back of commitment and dedication to a cause, a set of uncompromising values and the hard work of some of the most amazing people in the world. We remain established as the leader in Central Africa’s beauty industry today not by chance; we have put in the work for almost two decades now.
In the early 2000s, our founder, Mr. Valery, after haven been forced by lack of finance to choose petty business over university education, founded a beauty institute and named it Miami Beauty. This was after hawking beauty products and accessories on his head from quarter to quarter and having customers recommend that he starts offering them beauty services at home.
Miami Beauty had no chance of survival because of the inexperience of Mr. Valery at the time to run a beauty institute, coupled with how the beauty industry was poorly regarded and undignified back then. So Miami Beauty eventually closed down after the only hair dryer in the salon was confiscated by tax authorities who were never located.
year later, Mr. Valery would buyout the salon he had gone to, to learn about the beauty business. And as time went on, he realized that the same things that made Miami Beauty close down were the same things that were again happening in this new salon.
At this point, he had already adopted the name Spectra because of what it means: the word “spectra” is plural for “spectrum”, which means “lights”.
Mr. Valery explains that he chose this name because when he looked at the beauty industry in Cameroon back then, it was “dark”. It was made up of people who had either dropped out of school or people who were good for nothing in everything else in life and had lost all hope. So he decided to take it upon himself to be the one to bring beautiful lights into the beauty industry. That became the new mission of Spectra Beauté. Little did he know that he would at one point be thinking about closing down Spectra Beauté again.
“N'ABANDONNE J'AMAIS”
One disappointment led to another and when Spectra Beauté was finally at the verge of being closed (even at the recommendation of the staff), Mr. Valery found strength to continue after reading a poem titled “n’abandonne j’amais”, on the wall of a customer’s house that he had gone to serve. This was a defining moment in the history of Spectra Beauté. The new vigor, inspiration and commitment that he received from that poem is what got Spectra Beauté on its feet until this day.
“I have always worked for two people; the client and the beauty professional”, said Mr. Valery, whose vision of the beauty industry was to one day see beauty technicians and professionals treated with esteem and highly valued in society, well paid and able to cater for themselves and their loved ones, all from being beauty technicians. But he also knew that this could only happen if the beauty technicians were equipped and empowered enough to give relevant and undisputed value to customers. So the new Spectra Beauté would be built with this mission as its foundation.
Fast forward to today, we can say that we have successfully accomplished that mission and seen that vision unfold to fruition before our very eyes, against all odds. Beauty institutes now pay attention to how their environment is designed and deploy high quality equipments to aid them serve their clients better. Beauty professionals now earn enough to have a comfortable and dignified life, while being esteemed as worthy members of society. In a nutshell, Spectra Beauté raised the standards for the beauty industry so much so that anyone who wanted to start a beauty business had to comply to those standards to stand any chance of success.
Having accomplished the mission of bringing lights into the beauty industry, we are now set to bring lights to man’s greater self by being the source of inspiration and experience wellbeing for an advancing and ever-increasing life, for anyone who desires advancement in life and is ready to place value on it.
