Glitzy, Glamourous, and Just for Girls

Driving down Jericho Turnpike near Hillside Boulevard in New Hyde Park it tends to stand out – the large pink storefront with the rhyming alliterative name: Ritzy Glitzy Girlz Club.

“Everything pink was kind of my favorite thing and my mom said that she kind of forced pink on me because I was the baby that didn’t have any hair so she dressed me in pink so everyone would know I was a girl,” owner Vanetta Carraway says.

Carraway originally intended to open her glamour party store for girls in February, but Mother Nature had other plans, dropping a blizzard on the area instead. Instead, she has been operating the store normally, catering to girls ages four to 14 and offering the parties focused on the feminine: dress-up, manicures, pedicures, spa treatments, facials and fashion.

“It was just something that I’ve always done when I was a little girl,” Carraway said of holding parties in her younger days and dressing up in her grandmother’s clothes and doing the same for her cousins. “She had like little clip ons and fancy jewelry.”

A South Carolina native, Carraway has been living in New York since 1995 in Bellerose. She took a few courses in business management at a community college in Georgia after high school but did not graduate college. Carraway started the business in a van in 2007, going to clients’ homes and setting up shops in living rooms. A second van was added in 2011.

“It’s like I’m learning as I go with some of the things,” Carraway said. “It’s kind of like an on-the-job training type of thing that there are some things that I have come upon that I have stumbled with.”

Some of those stumbles have been in how exactly to decorate the store and handling staff due to the nature of the party business. One employee also managed to crash the van with a full day of parties already scheduled.

She said that she chose the New Hyde Park location due to the area being family oriented and the busyness of Jericho Turnpike.

“It’s kind of like the melting pot for Queens-Long Island, like right on the border, so it kind of gives us the reach to get to everybody,” she said.

The business specializes in birthday parties, dress-up parties and offers makeovers, manicures, pedicures as well as a fashion show option where girls can walk out on a pink runway and have their photos taken.

“It’s kind of like a glam dress-up party,” Carraway said, the store hosting a party for several four-year olds that day.

Party packages run from $425 in store for eight girls ($450 at home) for manicures, makeup and hair up to $495 ($525 at home) for scented spa treatments that include the aforementioned experiences as well as facial treatments and spa robes.

While the parties are aimed at girls between the ages of 4-14, Carraway says there have been girls as young as two come into the store.

“They come in and they actually know what they want,” she said. “They are like ‘I want pink with sparkles and purple’ and they sit there and they are ready to get it done.”

The business has about 12 part-time employees, known as “Glam Girls” or as Carraway calls them, “Pink Smurfs.” Carraway says that she wants to open new locations and franchise within five to 10 years as well as open a new location within 5 years but she has not decided where it would be located.

Carraway says that the appeal for this type of party experience is attractive to young girls who want to be more grown up and act like their parents.

“Just the trends of today where the kids are really into, they have the fashion video games, it’s like the kids are more advanced.. so they want to do more sophisticated things. Instead of the play kind of parties, the girls like to come in and they want to do what mommy does,” she says, adding the caveat of what her business offers. “You can’t come in mommy’s salon and make your own lip gloss or make your own lotion and all that good stuff, the creation.”

Some parents however, may feel that young girls are being asked – or rather, forced – to grow up far too soon with popular culture and the imagery as portrayed by certain media outlets.

“It’s a play thing,” Carraway says of what her store offers, acknowledging such parental concerns. “They come in and they get to play around like they would do at home in their mom’s makeup or in their grandmother’s makeup and stuff like that; they get to come in and have a good time and feel good about themselves. We have a few girls who come in a lot of times who are kind of shy and it kind of helps them to build up their confidence. We also instill inner beauty as well as outer beauty - whatever girls we have come in, our girls talk to the girls and just make them feel good about themselves; it’s not just about the makeup.”

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