She measures her days in small transformations — a color correction that finally lands the shade a client has chased for months, a tired face that leaves looking rested, a nervous first-timer who walks out standing a little taller. For Jhoan Escoto, the owner of Meraviglioso Beauty Lounge, the work has never really been about hair and skin alone. It is about the moment someone sits in her chair and lets their guard down.
That moment is the whole point.
Jhoan built Meraviglioso in the UAE, far from the country that shaped her, and she carries where she came from into everything the salon does. Building a business here, she says, “represents courage, perseverance, and the willingness to step outside of my comfort zone.” She is proud, she adds, that she can build something in the Emirates while holding on to the values she learned growing up in the Philippines — hard work, humility, and determination. The lounge is proof of a quieter conviction too: that Filipinos can make their own opportunities and build something that matters, even when home is thousands of miles away.
A room that feels like home
Walk into Meraviglioso and the first thing that registers is not a price list. It is a feeling. The staff aim for a room where everyone is comfortable, but there is a particular ease that settles over the Filipino clients who come through the door. Jhoan knows why. Her team understands the culture, the preferences, and, as she puts it, “sometimes even the little things that make them feel at home.” A conversation starts up. Someone laughs. The transaction fades into the background, and what is left is the sense of being somewhere you are actually wanted — not processed, not upsold, just welcomed.
That distinction — being cared for rather than merely served — is the line Jhoan draws around her entire operation. She has little interest in the churn of clients who come in, get a service, and leave without a second thought. “We want them to feel valued and cared for,” she says. The salon leans on the unglamorous fundamentals: quality, cleanliness, customer service, attention to detail. But the piece she returns to is listening. She wants her clients heard, and she wants her team to keep looking for ways to do better. Her theory of the business is almost stubbornly simple. When you genuinely care about the people in your chairs and the people holding the scissors, she believes, everyone can feel the difference. It is not a slogan she prints on the window. It is the thing she is testing every single day.
Running a salon in a competitive market does not leave much room for sentiment, and Jhoan is clear-eyed about that. Yet her instinct, again and again, is to talk about people before profit — the client who needs to trust the person touching her hair, the staff member who performs better when she feels looked after. It is a management philosophy that reads less like an MBA case study and more like something learned at home, in a household where humility was expected and effort was assumed.
Growth, but on her own terms
Ask her about the future and she does not reach for anything grandiose. Growth is part of the vision, she says, but so is patience. She wants the Meraviglioso brand strengthened and its foundation solid before she reaches for the next thing. “I would love to see Meraviglioso grow into multiple locations in the UAE and eventually beyond,” she says — and then, almost in the same breath, she pulls the ambition back to earth. Things are being done step by step. Sustainable growth, in her view, beats fast growth every time. So yes, more branches may come. But they will come when the ground beneath them is ready, not before.
There is a discipline in that restraint that tells you something about how she got here. Jhoan is not chasing the appearance of success. She is building the real thing, slowly, in a place that does not hand it out.
What she tells the ones just starting
That may be why her advice to other Filipinas dreaming of a business of their own lands with such weight. Do not be afraid to start small, she says, and do not wait for everything to be perfect before you begin. She knows what she is asking of them, because she has lived it. Starting a business abroad is hard, especially when your family and everything familiar are somewhere else. There will be moments, she admits, when you question yourself. But she frames those moments not as warnings to turn back — rather as the very thing that makes a person stronger.
Her counsel is practical, the kind passed between women who have actually done the work. Learn as much as you can. Surround yourself with people who believe in what you are building. Take care of your customers and your team. And, above all, believe in yourself. Success, she is quick to remind anyone listening, does not arrive overnight. “Be patient, stay consistent, and never forget why you started.”
It is worth sitting with that last line, because it doubles as a portrait of the woman who said it. Jhoan has not forgotten why she started. You can see it in the way she talks about her clients less like accounts and more like guests, in her refusal to expand faster than she can do it well, in the pride she takes in carrying her upbringing into a foreign market and refusing to leave it at the door.
Meraviglioso, in Italian, points toward the marvelous. But there is nothing accidental about what happens inside Jhoan’s lounge. The warmth is deliberate. The standards are held on purpose. The slow, careful growth is a choice she makes and remakes. What looks from the outside like a beauty salon is, up close, something a good deal more personal — one Filipina’s insistence that the people who sit in her chairs deserve to feel, if only for an hour, genuinely at home.
