Visiting is a luxurious experience that all sorts of people are welcome to enjoy, founder Laura Everhart said.

Elle Jay provides a range of services for men and women that target different areas. The salon offers massage therapy, manicures and pedicures, waxing, hair care and styling and more. At the spa, certain therapies and treatments include facials and chemicals peels meant to improve complexion, plus others that plump skin and otherwise improve appearance.

Higher-end treatments include hair restoration, weight loss, body contouring, and multifaceted treatments that stimulate muscles to work on correcting urinary incontinence. There are laser therapies that treat nail fungus. Services can be either clinical or aesthetic or both.

Though many of the treatments are cosmetic, Everhart emphasized that their purpose is not for vanity but to provide people with a “mental health boost.”

From left are Michelle Goudreau, Amy McInnis, Laura Everhart and Dana Vix, key persons involved with providing wellness treatments at Elle Jay Aesthetic Studio, a salon and spa in Manistique. (Courtesy photo)

Everhart, a pharmacist by trade, manages the pharmacy at Schoolcraft Memorial Hospital. As Everhart was nearing the tail end of her career, her mother — Dolores “Dee” Connolly — encouraged her to find something else to do before retirement, “because she was worried about what health care does to people, the stressful job,” Everhart said.

Everhart and her mother were close. The daughter had moved to the Upper Peninsula about 22 years ago, largely to be close to her parents. Before that, she had grown up downstate, went into the Army for a few years, attended pharmacy school in Minnesota and then moved to Gould City with her husband, Joel, so their children could grow up near their grandparents. Everhart’s parents had relocated to the U.P. just after she joined the Army.

Together, the two women began to make plans to open their own spa. The pair enjoyed treating themselves to salon and spa days when they could, but the trouble with living in a remote area is that without such services close by, travel is required, adding stress and time onto what’s meant to be a relaxing experience.

“Everybody has to go far away,” Everhart said, adding that when she and her mom wanted to go get massages and have their hair and nails done, “I’d have to take a day off — a vacation … spend the entire day and be exhausted the next day. It’s a production, right? You can’t really utilize those kind of services the way that they’re intended, because it’s hard to take those kind of days off.”

With a plan to form their own business in the central U.P., Everhart and her mother looked for a building for about two years. In October 2023, two big things happened. One was that Everhart got a phone call telling her she was able to close on the building they had finally picked. It should have been the start of a dream come true — except for the other event that happened right around the same time.

The "Mingo Room," a treatment room at Elle Jay Aesthetic Studio salon and spa in Manistique. "We treat clients with injectables, including filler, tox, PRP and other biostimulators, perform microneedling treatments and minor skin irregularity removal (skin tags, brown spots, red freckles …) in this room," owner Laura Everhart said. (Courtesy photo)

“About a couple days before we got that phone call to close, we had terrible news that my mom had a terrible diagnosis that none of us expected,” Everhart said, choking up. “We did not realize that she was sick, and they gave her two months.”

Everhart told her mother that she wasn’t going to move forward alone with the plan to open the spa, which the two of them were supposed to work on together.

“And she thought about it for a few seconds and she said, ‘No, you finish.’ That’s what I did,” Everhart said. “And she passed three months later. I was able to stay home with her and take care of her, but we really didn’t have time to wrap our heads around it.”

Despite the shock of suddenly losing her mother and would-be business partner, Everhart spent the next year renovating the space they had chosen — part of the former People’s Store, erected in 1915 at the corner of Oak and Cedar streets in downtown Manistique. Today, the space has been divided; Ben Franklin occupies the northern portion while Elle Jay Aesthetic Studio has made the area on the corner home.

The new business transformed the old space, creating an entirely fresh space to house the salon and spa.

“We put in all new electric, plumbing, heating, walls … Floor to ceiling, everything’s new,” Everhart said.

She said it felt like her mother was “there for the whole thing, because none of it was stressful. … So she brought me wonderful people. Every single contractor was wonderful to work with. … And the people that come to use Elle Jay have all been wonderful. Clients and people that work there, they all just fell in my lap. … I feel like they were heaven-sent.”

In May 2024, Elle Jay opened with some limited salon services — hair and nails. The full grand opening followed in September 2024, adding most of the other services.

Since then, within the past year, a handful of other offerings have been added. Everhart explained that newer services include the women’s wellness platform, weight loss and platelet-rich plasma, or PRP, injections that are meant to stimulate collagen production.

Fifteen people work at Elle Jay Aesthetic Studio, many of whom are independent contractors who provide their services from the premises at 241 S. Cedar St. Cosmetologists, nurse practitioners, massage therapists, a manicurist, a makeup artist and a photographer all work at Elle Jay to provide various services to clients from near and far in a pleasing environment.

“I designed it for everybody,” Everhart said. She described her business as a luxury place, but one that welcomes Yoopers in boots and flannels with messy hair and no makeup. “You feel like you’re in a very fancy place that we don’t get in the U.P., but you’re very welcome and you’re supposed to be there,” she said. “We’re just trying to make the folks that are from here feel good about themselves.”

Elle Jay Aesthetic Studio also offers a payment program to break up bills into more affordable, smaller payments over time.

For more information about Elle Jay, go online to ellejayaestheticstudio.com, call 906-553-4888 or drop into the business at the corner of Oak and Cedar in Manistique. The spa is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and for a few hours on select Saturdays; the salon is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays.