We’ve all heard about waxing our bodies, but have you ever heard about sugaring your body? Well, if you hadn’t heard about it before, now you have.

SugarKane Sugaring Spa, located at 302 Davis Grove Cir #6014 in Cary, isn’t any regular spa. This is a spa where you can go to have your body hairs removed gently with a sugar paste.

Robin Lockhart, the founder of the spa, became a certified sugarist in 2007. To become a surgarist you have to have your esthetician’s license. You can receive this by taking skincare courses, like facials, anatomy and physiology, and hair removal.

“Body sugaring is an all-natural, ancient Egyptian technique that leads to permanent hair reduction,” Lockhart said.

Lockhart started working as a sugarist and masseuse on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship for about nine months. However, when she returned stateside in 2010, she started to focus solely on her sugaring, and, in 2015, she opened her own building in Cary. It took a couple of years, but in 2018, she was able to work her business full time.

Lockhart said she had to “jump out on faith.”

“God, it’s just you and me,” she said. “I’m not going back to corporate America. I’m trusting you to supply all my needs.”

Lockhart continued, “I became certified in Yumi Lash Lift in Beverly Hills.” Yumi Lash is a special treatment that lifts, curls and boosts natural eyelashes. Lockhart said working for herself is the hardest work that she’s ever done. “But when I’m sugaring my clients, it’s like therapy and happiness.”

According to the SugarKane Sugaring website, they remove unwanted body hair from men and women, as well as perform Brazilians, body grooming and lashes care. They also do treatment for ingrown hairs and skin discoloration.

Born in New York but raised in Rockingham, N.C., about an hour and a half out of Charlotte. Lockhart said Helius and their business mentoring model kind of fell into her lap.

She said it started with an email. However, because she was so busy, she rarely saw her emails.

“This email was as if God wanted me to see it and apply,” Lockhart said. She had decided to listen to God and work with Helius because she believed it was something she needed personally and something that her business needed. “It was time to invest in me. Be in a program where I’m making my business better.”

Lockhart said obstacles stood in her way from getting the business off the ground. These obstacles included having a firm foundation with her business process, marketing, advertising, and finding a way to get people to understand what sugaring was and why it was a healthier option for hair removal.

“Helius helped me to overcome these obstacles by making me commit,” Lockhart said. She commited to be on time, focused and learning how to be successful.

“Sometimes, as entrepreneurs, we don’t take time to sit back and look at our business from a different lens. That’s what Helius did for me,” Lockhart said.

Although being an entrepreneur can be lonely sometimes, Lockhart never missed a class because she was amongst the community — other entrepreneurs who were just like her but at different stages in their businesses.

One project Helius had Lockhart and her class do was a public marketing pitch, similar to Shark Tank, which was her first public marketing pitch. She said that was her “springboard” to spread the word about sugaring to clients.

Lockhart said the one-on-one support that was given to her after the Helius program ended was inspiring.

Lockhart is confident her SugarKane Sugaring business is on it’s way to being a billion dollar business. She plans to achieve this by selling her paste so people can do the sugaring at home. She is looking too soon to relocate her business by purchasing land and building a container salon.

Lockhart said while sugaring and lash lifts are the easiest parts of running her business, the tough tasks include running checks and balances of the business such as taxes and accounting can be tough. Still, she is thankful for the step up that Helius gave her.

“Each night we talked about business. We challenged ourselves. We made friendships. It was a nice business family. We supported each other,” she said.

The Helius Foundation provides small businesses and necessity-driven entrepreneurs with free business training and coaching, and access to low-interest microloans.