13-Year Old Teen Mom Turned Successful Entrepreneur

Jessica Thomas is the Womanpreneur of Glam Bella Studio in Tampa, FL. She has been in business for four years. She says she is different and has embraced her uniqueness. She shares her inspirational journey of faith and how she achieved success. Jessica, tell us about Glam Bella Studio.

Glam Bella Studio is an eyelash extension studio located in Tampa, Florida. We provide eyelash extension services. We also have an academy where we teach other professionals how to grow their businesses by performing eyelash extension services as well.

I had my first child when I was 13 years old, and I had my second child when I was 18. I had just graduated from high school- well I’m going to say barely graduated from high school (chuckling) and being a young Mom, people always tell you, “Oh you’re not going to amount to anything.” I used to work a bunch of dead-end jobs. I was always in college. I would enroll in school, I would do good, and I would drop out because I wasn’t interested. So fast forwarding, working little call centers jobs and getting fired, because I was always doing lashes or calling off to take lash clients, or doing makeup or something. I just looked at my kids, and I said to myself, "I have to do something for my kids so they know that they can make it. I can’t expect them to be successful when I’m around here barely making it” and I’m not living up to my fullest potential. So on my 25th birthday, I walked into a beauty school, and I was like - “Sign me up, I want to be a lash artist so I can make a bunch of money!”

I was just like this is what I’m going to do. I ran a Groupon ad, and just “a lot of prayers, a lot of tears, a lot of telling myself I have no other options, this has to work.” And it all came together. I literally went in there with nothing. I was just saying this has to work - and failure is not an option. I’ve tried different things, and I’ve had to tweak some things. We are going into our fourth year that I’ve been open independently. So I tweaked a lot of things along the way. Some things worked, some things didn’t. I incorporated a lot of policies, but the biggest thing was that “I stepped out on faith literally, with a set of tweezers and one lash tray.” Now here I am - four years later.

Having a baby at a young age is not a period at the end of your life - it's just a comma. You are going to make it"

Photo provided by Jessica Thomas courtesy of Glam Bella Studio