The reality TV industry is highly lucrative and ever-booming. On Thursday, the first season of the highly-anticipated new E! reality show, Second Wives Club, premiered at a posh “realiTEA” party and screening under the stars at Station Hollywood within the W Hotel. At the event, hosted by the popular Hi SocieTEA mini tea bar in Hollywood, the Second Wives Club cast and other celebrities mingled and toasted to the start of the show in style.
Second Wives Club is an eight-episode, hour-long docu-series that chronicles the lives of six women who are married or engaged to wealthy and successful men. In Hollywood, second wives are often painted as opportunistic women who swoop in to take advantage of everything their powerful husbands have to offer. However, Second Wives Club proves otherwise. For example, even though the wives live in multi-million dollar homes and have opulent cars with champagne refrigerators, that doesn’t mean they don’t have to navigate the complications that come with having stepchildren and more.
The ladies also have profitable entrepreneurial endeavors to handle beyond the TV screen. Just ask Katie Cazorla, who owns celebrity favorites Hi SocieTEA and The Painted Nail salon at the W Hollywood. At the season premiere, Katie stopped by on the red carpet to chat with Home Business Magazine about her businesses. First, she was happy to share what inspired her to launch Hi SocieTEA.
“I was running The Painted Nail, which was my nail shop here for quite a few years, and hotel guests kept coming into the salon and asking where there was a cool place to get high tea,” she said. “I thought, ‘why doesn’t the W, a.k.a. THE fancy hotel in Los Angeles, have a place to do tea? I’m sending them to other hotels! So I met with the W and said, ‘I run a legit business here already, is there a way we can segue this into another business?’
For two and a half years, I traveled the world and did high tea everywhere, from London to Hong Kong, to Moscow,” Katie shared. “I really went on a world tour and divulged myself in all things tea–green tea, white tea, oolong…I mean, everything. I feel like I’m the new queen of teas instead of nails. (laughs) I still love nails, but I feel like at this point, tea mixes in with everything. You can make tea elixers with cocktails, you can have tea with champagne, you can have tea by itself, tea in the morning, tea at night… this is my reality. I run three businesses.”
She went on to share how she balances running her businesses and shooting Second Wives Club.
“Shooting the show was madness!” she said. “I balance and keep track of everything with iCal on my iPhone and day drinking (laughs).
And what has the whole Second Wives Club experience been like?
“Shooting the show has been very interesting, mainly because it is an ensemble cast.” she said. “You have to learn to shoot and do things with other people. It can tend to be one of those things where you are like, ‘okay, am I going to love this person? Am I not going to love this person?’
At the end of the day, we all kind of relate to each other, because we are in similar situations. You can’t deny that. We have to deal with ex-wives and step-kids, so we relate on that level. Some of us were friends before we even started filming, so it just kind of made sense. We didn’t even know we were cast until the day we walked in for the meeting. I was like, ‘What are you doing here!’ (laughs) We shot the show and here we are, two years later.”
Throughout the party, guests also enjoyed spirits from Devotion Vodka, Heineken brews, and tasty Strongbow cider.
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