NILES — Tans Down Under turned 25 years old this year, and it has been rooted by friends and family since day one, said owner Stefanie Heide.

Amidst the tanning beds, tanning booths, tanning products and an assortment of stuffed animal koalas at the 1700 Oak St. store in Niles, Heide and her friend’s daughters run the shop.

The makeup of staff is reminiscent of when Tans Down Under first opened in April 1994 next to what is now Samuel Mancino’s Italian Eatery at 1221 S. 11th. Heide and her friend, Theresa Flint-Suseland, worked the afternoon shift, while Heide’s mother, Pat Heide, and her friend, Joan Cassel, worked mornings.

“She started it hoping me and my best friend would run it for her,” Heide said. “We said, ‘Of course we’ll run it for you. It’s a tanning salon. We’re spending $60 a month tanning on our own.”’

While Flint-Suseland now has another job — she helps with Tans Down Under’s marketing when she can — other friendships have developed, Heide said.

“I came in with this small group of friends, and now I feel like, ‘Oh my God,’” she said. “I have 100 friends at the tanning salon now.”

Tans Down Under itself has been developing, too. When Heide purchased the business in 2007, she began adding a more versatile range of products — “keeping things fresh,” as Heide put it.

“The salons in the area, Granger, South Bend, you got to keep up with something like that to bring people coming in,” she said. “We started off with nice, new equipment, but they were small, long, 30-minute timers.”

So, Heide began to add variety. She added a spray tan station, 15-minute tanning beds and 10-minute tanning booths, or tanning stations where the customer stands upright.

The service has stayed the same, however. Heide said she continues to cater to everyone’s cosmetic wants. She offers a variety of tanning lotions for a variety of skin tones. She adjusts tanning bed and booth times to ease a customer into the experience, and she creates relationships with longtime customers either hoping to move beyond the pale during the snowy season or who need to relax after a day’s work.

Some of her customers, new and old, were able to celebrate Tans Down Under’s 25th anniversary with Heide. Earlier this month, she offered discounted products and services as a way to thank her customers.

She also took the anniversary to thank her staff past and present, her mother and her husband, Matt Hanback, who works on Tans Down Under’s maintenance despite a full-time job.

With the anniversary sale wrapped up, Heide said she is now looking forward to a busy winter season and more years of providing cosmetic tans to customers.

“I don’t know if I see another 25 years in my future,” she wrote in an anniversary post on the business’s Facebook page Oct. 20. “I’ll be pretty darn old by then.”