Kevin Huynh, Founder of The Nail Superstore

From a twelve-year-old entrepreneur in Saigon to the founder of a professional nail supply company in Chicago — a life spent looking for better solutions and helping hardworking business owners succeed.

For more than thirty years, Kevin Huynh and The Nail Superstore have served nail technicians and salon owners with reliable products, reasonable prices, knowledgeable service, and practical answers to the everyday demands of running a salon.

This is how that started.

An entrepreneur at twelve

In the 1980s, Vietnam was still rebuilding after the war and poverty was widespread. Few families could afford a car or a motorcycle. Bicycles were how nearly everyone got around — which meant a flat tire was a daily emergency, and repair shops on every corner went through tire adhesive constantly.

They bought it in small cans, at a high cost per repair, because that was the only way it was sold.

Kevin was twelve when he started supplying the same quality adhesive in large bulk bottles instead. The shops lowered their cost per repair, cut their operating expenses, and kept more of what they earned.

That taught him the principle he still works by: understand the customer's problem, find a practical solution, and help them either save money or make more of it.

He was twelve, and he had already found the work he would spend his life doing. It just had nothing to do with nails yet.

A 27-day journey between life and death

His family could not afford to send everyone.

So at fifteen, Kevin left Vietnam alone, without his family, on a boat with fifty-seven other people seeking freedom from the communist regime.

The crossing took twenty-seven days. They faced severe thirst and hunger, violent storms, mechanical failure, and attacks by pirates. On the open sea, the difference between life and death could change in an instant.

After surviving the journey and reaching Thailand, Kevin spent two years in a refugee camp before receiving the opportunity to begin a new life in the United States.

He arrived with very little, but the experience gave him determination, resilience, gratitude, and the ability to keep moving forward when circumstances seemed impossible.

Learning the business from the salon floor

In the early 1990s the family opened a nail salon on Rainier Avenue in Seattle — one of the first Vietnamese-owned nail salons in the city.

Working in it, Kevin learned what nail professionals actually face. Salon owners needed products that performed, prices that made sense, and inventory they could count on. They needed suppliers who understood how expensive it gets when an essential product is out of stock or doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

The gap between what working technicians needed and what the supply market was delivering was wide. That gap became his business.

Building The Nail Superstore

In 1995, Kevin moved to Chicago and opened Skyline Beauty Supply in the Tài Nam Market, part of the city's early Vietnamese-owned professional nail supply community.

In 1997 the name changed to The Nail Superstore, reflecting a bigger idea: a single dependable source where nail professionals could find products, tools, information, and new business ideas in one place.

Searching the world for products worth selling

Over more than thirty years, Kevin has traveled to more than thirty countries and attended hundreds of trade shows looking for products worth putting his name on.

He looks past familiar brands and popular trends. He's looking for the product that solves a real problem, works faster or more reliably, wastes less, or opens up a service a salon can add to the menu and charge for.

But he does not buy from catalogs.

Not from brochures, not from a sales email, not from a phone call, not from a promise made at a trade show booth. Every one of those is a description of a product written by the person who wants to sell it.

His standard is to meet the supplier face to face and visit the factory. He wants to see how the product is made and ask hard questions about materials, manufacturing, quality control, and consistency.

Before anything goes in the catalog, he wants to know:

• Why does this perform well — not that it does, but why
• How and where is it actually made
• Does it solve a real problem for a working nail professional
• Does it bring a genuinely new or useful idea
• Will it help a salon save time, cut expenses, or earn more
• Is the supplier dependable, and will they stand behind it
• Can we offer it at a price that makes sense

He also invests in long-term relationships with the manufacturers themselves. Those relationships are what let you fix a problem quickly, improve a product over time, hold quality steady, and keep an important item in stock when supply gets tight.

“The product is for my customer, not for me. My responsibility is to do the research, visit the factory, ask the difficult questions, and do the work on my customer’s behalf.”

He's buying for a salon owner or nail tech who can't fly to Asia or Europe to inspect a production line, and who has to decide whether to risk a month's supply budget on something she's only seen in a photograph. So he goes instead. That's the job.

Curious by nature, hands-on by choice

Kevin studied electrical engineering in college. He never finished the degree, but the way of thinking stayed with him — he has always wanted to know how something works and how it could work better.

Much of what he knows about business and technology is self-taught. When the company needs a new skill, system, or solution, he studies it, tests it, and finds a practical way forward. That's how the warehouse operations, the online tools, and most of the systems behind this business got built.

He is not a founder who stepped back from the business. He is still directly involved in purchasing, pricing, product development, inventory, warehouse operations, technology, e-commerce, marketing, logistics, customer service, and long-term planning.

Here, if it's on the site, Kevin put it there — which means he also knows exactly what salon owners are up against. Products have to work. Prices have to make sense. Orders have to be right. Supplies have to be there when you need them.

Supporting the community that built the industry

Kevin remains especially grateful to the Vietnamese nail community. This industry gave him, his family, and thousands of other immigrants the chance to build stable lives and independent businesses in this country.

He believes The Nail Superstore owes that community something in return: honest business practices, dependable products, fair value, useful information, and service in both English and Vietnamese.

A message from Kevin

Work with passion. Live with compassion.

— Kevin Huynh, Founder and Owner, The Nail Superstore