Mal
Have you guys met my best friend and co-collaborator?
This is my dude Mal, I think she is the COOLEST and I’ll tell you why.
Fast friends we were not (I don’t really do fast friends anymore tbh). I met Mallory when she was a new mom and had just started working for me as a part-time receptionist at my salon. She was a…good-enough receptionist 😅. Though she sometimes tended to chat a bit too much and she forgot things, clients liked her and she never tried to hide it from me when she fucked things up, so I liked her too 💛.
It wasn’t long into her employment at Maxwell Salon that she started to experience symptoms that we now know are related to Sarcoidosis.
At the time everything was new, unknown and really really scary. She was calling out of a lot of shifts, and often seemed to have something going on with her health. As an employer it always puts me in a difficult position when someone starts calling out a lot, but just as I was starting to grapple with what to do about it, Mal asked me to talk and shared with me what was going on. I’m forever grateful that she had that up front conversation with me.
Our conversation led to her deciding to take a leave of absence from front desk and me creating the position of Social Media Manager for Maxwell Salon. She needed to pay medical bills, take care of her family and not be committed to a set schedule, I needed help taking care of our salon social media- a perfect arrangement and a way to keep a person in whom I saw giant potential on my team. I showed her what to do and how I wanted it done and tried my best to let go control and give her space to make decisions about content. We started checking in together frequently to make sure we were on the same page. Her open and direct communication helped me to find the same in myself, something I was not naturally good at.
That was in 2016, since then our working relationship has evolved and grown into something so beautiful and collaborative. She gets what I’m saying before I’ve even said it sometimes and then she snowballs the idea with something to make it even better!
Working with Mal has shown me that with the right people on your team, anything is possible. I hope someday soon I can find a way to repay her for the time, effort and heart she’s put in to bringing StylistAlicia Studios to life and making it the badass empowerment movement that I’ve always wanted to be a part of.
She’s adopted my can’t stop, won’t stop attitude and she has more than a few solo projects in the works when she’s not working with me, go check them out and share with your cool friends!
She’s not just a total babe and a funny ‘Reels’ maker. She’s also a painter of both faces and canvas, she’s the original Cannabougie Baddie, a witchy cat & human mom, a wife and a super cool, smart human worth getting to know!
Enjoy these photos from our studio test shoots as well as a few from her private greenhouse sesh last summer ✨🌱
Love you girl 💛
❤️✌🏻
