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INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW

From a Bridal Side Hustle to a Travel Empire

52 minutes

Season 6

·

Episode 5

In This Conversation

Most people start a side hustle to make a little extra on the weekends. Barbie Patel turned hers into a company.

It started about eighteen years ago, for the least glamorous reason imaginable: she was getting married and couldn't find a makeup artist who could match her skin tone. So she learned to do it herself — and then for everyone else. Cinderella Brides was born out of a gap in the market nobody was serving.

What she did next is the part most founders skip. She didn't quit. She kept the corporate job and banked her entire salary for three years, living off the side business until the math made leaving a decision instead of a gamble. She walked away from corporate in 2018. When COVID took her husband's food businesses, the plan they'd built held.

Today Lux Escapes is three divisions and three and a half years old — and Barbie joins Bryan to talk about what the job actually looks like when you're the person clients call at 2am from another time zone. Why AI can plan an itinerary but can't tell you that not everybody's your client. The décor budget that's in a dumpster by 8pm. What she looks for on a site visit that no brochure will ever show you — including the renovated closets too shallow to hang a garment bag, and the one hotel that got the hair dryer right. Plus the Instagram destinations that don't survive contact with reality, and the lemonade stand in Flushing Meadow Park that taught her everything about work ethic before she turned fourteen.

Key Topics

Leaving corporate in 2018 — and what happened when COVID hit the family's other businesses

"Think of yourself as the nucleus" — the mentor advice that reorganized how she builds

What earns her trust on a site visit: closets, drawers, and the details that reveal the whole property

In This Episode:

  • Why Cinderella Brides started with a problem she couldn't solve for herself

  • The three-year runway: banking a full salary while building the business on nights and weekends

  • Buying a travel franchise, abandoning it, and getting their own IATA instead

  • Iceland, a New Jersey wedding, and the photo shoot that shouldn't have worked

  • AI versus the human travel advisor — and why "not everybody's your client" is the real skill

  • Décor budgets in the trash by 8pm, welcome bags, and what guests actually keep

  • Bryan's check-in police rant, straight from the rooms division

  • Overhyped on camera, underwhelming in person — the destinations and restaurants that don't hold up

  • Inside the Lux Travel Advisor Program and the Wedding Planner Partner Program

  • Immigrant parents, a lemonade stand at 13, and Claire's Accessories

  • "You can always tell the character of a person by the way they treat a service staff person"

  • Workcations, balance, and buying your weekends back — the oxygen mask rule

Barbie Patel

Barbie Patel

Co-Founder/CEO

Luxx Escapes / Cinderella Bridez

LinkedIn Logo and Link

About Our Guest

Barbie Patel is the President and CEO of Cinderella Bridez, the bridal beauty brand she founded nearly two decades ago while working in corporate sales on Wall Street. A Columbia University graduate, she managed a $10 million territory at LexisNexis, with accounts including Goldman Sachs and RBS. She built Cinderella Bridez into an internationally recognized company serving multi-day South Asian and multicultural weddings across the U.S., Europe, Mexico, and the Caribbean. It has served more than 2,500 brides and works with a nationwide team of over 40 artists. She also founded Beauty CEO University, which teaches business and marketing skills to beauty professionals. She co-founded Luxx Escapes, a luxury wedding travel and destination planning service that handles hotel and venue reservations for wedding groups. She is writing The Beauty Boss Blueprint. A sought-after educator and speaker, she has appeared in Forbes, USA Today, Philadelphia magazine, The Knot, and Maharani Weddings, and on Bravo's Family Karma. She built all of her ventures without outside funding.