by Miko Branch
Don’t be surprised by what flies in your window. Good things come to those who persevere, often when they least expect it.
Titi and I celebrated across the street from Target’s headquarters with a glass of champagne at Zelo, clinking our glasses together as we made lists of all the people we would call to share the news: our mother, our father, and Uncle Irvin, for starters. We couldn’t wait to hear their reactions.
That night I felt particularly close to my sister.
“Miko, we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you,” she told me.
Although we had long since reconciled, we never spoke much about the lawsuit. We were running the business and getting it done, but we were finally back to being a true sister act. We had been through so much, and I could not help but think that those hard times were meant to prepare us for the success to follow. Now that we were on the national stage, there would be no time for bad blood, hurt feelings, and lawsuits. We were sisters building an empire, and there was no place for division.
As I lay my head down to sleep that night, I also thought of Miss Jessie. For my entire life, I was so very proud to be her granddaughter. That night I felt she had me in her sights, and in that moment I knew she was proud to be my grandmother.
BUILDING YOUR DREAM
A Simple Small-Business Recipe
Step One
Find the opportunity. Observe and absorb everything around you to find out what people want and what is missing in the marketplace. Combine this information with your true passion and natural talent to put together the big idea.
Step Two
Set the standard. Source only the best possible ingredients or components to ensure that you are not just the first to market but the best. When the competition catches on, you will keep your customer’s loyalty.
Step Three
Leverage the resources you have. Once the concept has been developed and the prototype has been created, start small. If you have to work out of your garage, kitchen, or basement, so be it. If you have a parent, sister, cousin, aunt, or uncle willing to pitch in and offer skills or time for free, even better. You’d be surprised how far you can get without huge piles of capital.
Step Four
Communicate expectations clearly. This applies to any small business that is a partnership. Whether you are in business with a family member, friend, or associate, establish in writing exactly who does what and who has ultimate control. Leave no room for ambiguity.
Step Five
Use grassroots networks to get the word out. Let your brand’s reputation build by word of mouth. Use social media and start building personal relationships with smaller vendors who will carry your product. Invest in some PR.
Step Six
Pace yourself. Be careful not to expand too much, too fast. Many small businesses die because they get too cocky about their growth prospects and overleveraged.
Step Seven
Find a mentor. Find someone in your field or industry whom you admire, and reach out. Many more seasoned and successful entrepreneurs are looking to pay it forward and flattered to be tapped for their expertise. Try to do this early on in your career, then proceed with caution. As you become more established, not everyone who approaches you will have altruistic motives. These relationships can be mutually beneficial as long as you first figure out where they are coming from and what, if anything, they want from you.
Step Eight
Keep the cash! While it may be tempting to pay and treat yourself once you start seeing some sustained sales, resist. What you don’t reinvest in the business or an asset such as real estate, put into a savings account. Stay debt-free and build a safety cushion. Maintaining liquidity will protect you from the unforeseen, such as a lost customer, unexpected litigation, or a general economic downturn.
Step Nine
Prepare for growth. You will reach a point where you can’t do everything by yourself. As your business takes off, you may need to outsource distribution and manufacturing. You may also need a larger space or warehouse. Take steps to ensure that when the next big order comes, you will have the capacity. Continue to manage growth by adapting operations and adding resources accordingly.
Step Ten
Hire wisely. When you are launching a new business, you don’t need a lot of hands on deck, but you do need at least one or two trusted employees. Interview carefully, and don’t just consider how the candidate comes across on paper. You want like-minded people who are willing to pitch in and do whatever needs to be done, regardless of job description and title.
Step Eleven
Blow it up. Keep communicating with your customers about the latest product or company news. Get creative, and go beyond your industry’s trade shows to festivals, concerts, anywhere your customer might be. Interact with these consumers, hand out free samples, do demos. Let them know that you are the face of the brand and create that personal connection. These moves will get you talked about where it counts.
Step Twelve
Evolve your product line. Once you’ve established your brand, keep it moving with new categories, more options, and a healthy range of choices. Don’t launch a product just because everyone else is doing it. Pay close attention to customer feedback on social media or, as in our case, through salons and retail, to find out how your customer’s tastes and needs are changing. When she expresses a desire, it’s your opportunity to meet that through brand extension.
Step Thirteen
Pick a partner, or don’t. As your company grows and you get on the radar of bigger players, there’s going to come a time when you get invited to the big leagues. This is good news; it’s the outcome that so many small-business owners dream of. But don’t leap blindly at the first offer. Consider what you’ll be giving up (autonomy and ownership) as well as what you’ll gain (money, access, scale). If the offer requires you to give up too much of the identity the brand has been built on, it may not be worth it. Never be afraid to sit out a dance or two.
Twelve
NEW GROWTH
Competition is the keen cutting edge of business.
—HENRY FORD
When we struck the Target deal, we were on a high. We shared what we knew of the deal with our family. We also spoke with a small handful of individuals we trusted with a few details of our business, and they filled in many of the blanks of what the Target deal meant. Thank God we’d outsourced our distribution less than a month earlier. We had no idea of the full value that outsourcing would bring us with this new mass account. Luckily, we had worked out the kinks in the new system just in time for the avalanche of orders about to hit us. Without that, we would not have had the capacity to leverage the huge opportunity.
Because we were not prepared, it seemed like the big-box relationship brought with it new rules. It was a whole new phase of growth that required us to adapt—and fast. Reaching that level in retail isn’t the end of your problems, it’s the beginning of a whole new set of complications, and the learning curve is high. We were a small company, unschooled in the ways of mass retail. We didn’t know the lingo, and we didn’t have any contacts or anyone we could talk to about it. Worse, we didn’t realize how extensive the gaps in our retail knowledge really were.
There was no time to waste as we familiarized ourselves with terms like “planograms” (store layout for product placement), “SKUs” (stock keeping units), and “ad dollars” (when an advertisement is camera-ready). There’s a big difference between learning words and learning a language, understanding what these words mean, and knowing that they have consequences. That first year, we were being asked to deliver and be responsive to all kinds of things, and half the time we had no idea what they were asking for. But what a problem to have!
To try to get a handle on it, I viewed it like a first date at the big dance. It felt like love at first sight, but I quickly understood that, as partners, we really did not know each other very well. What we did know about one another, we liked, but we needed to get to
know more. From my perspective, the Miss Jessie’s team was like the girl from the other side of town (or maybe even the wrong side of the tracks), and the Target team was like “big man on campus” that everybody adored. We had never been invited to this sort of party before and everything was new. Compared with Target’s other “partners,” I am sure that we were a little rough around the edges, unsophisticated, and certainly less familiar with the rules involved when “courting” Target. Our first few “dances” with Target were a bit rough and clumsy. To be sure, we stepped on each other’s toes and made some mistakes. But over time, we found our rhythm and were dancing in step. Target showed us a few new moves; some we loved and some we didn’t, and so we had to make adjustments. We also taught Target some new steps as well as showing the firm that for this relationship to work, we would not be spun around the floor like some others: we needed to move together and at a pace that made sense to us. In the end, Target was a willing partner and understood that we added something new and exciting to the overall dance. We earned mutual respect. Before long, Target was inviting more and more partners to join. At times the dance floor feels a bit overcrowded with new partners coming and going, but that’s part of the experience and it keeps everyone on their toes. I learned the dance pretty quickly, learned how to keep up, and even invented a few new steps, because I was certain that I was not going to lose my partner.
The most successful business owners know they must continually evolve and learn if they want to play in the big leagues.
As we familiarized ourselves with a whole new level of the retail industry, in many ways we were also changing the way things were done. Almost from the beginning, we understood that the Miss Jessie’s mission was bigger than catering to black women. Because we were working in the salon and serviced an ethnically diverse group of women, we knew that there was a world of curly-haired women—not just black women with curly hair. That is a big and important distinction. Our philosophy was to address the texture of the hair and not the color of the skin. Honestly, our approach was no different from other beauty brands that address a particular beauty need. For example, body moisturizers are aimed at women with dry skin, oily skin, or perhaps sensitive skin—but you would never promote a product as exclusively for women with dark skin or white skin. It would be offensive. It is the condition of the skin that matters, not the color of the skin. Yet for reasons that I still do not completely understand, the hair sections in most major retail chain stores are completely segregated by race and have nothing to do with hair texture.
Initially, there was absolute resistance from retail partners to placing the Miss Jessie’s products anywhere other than in the ethnic sections of their stores. There was even an unwillingness to place the Miss Jessie’s products in the “pro” or “salon” hair-care products sections—even though I had been a stylist for over two decades and the Miss Jessie’s products were first widely distributed through salons. Apparently, because we were black and the majority of our customers were black, the products had to be placed in the ethnic section, even though women of every color with curly hair knew about, used, and would buy the products.
Placing our products in the ethnic section had no appeal to us because the beauty aesthetic, price point, and brand origins of most products found in the ethnic section were in conflict with the Miss Jessie’s products and philosophy. Big-box retailers carried ethnic hair products that mostly centered on relaxer hair care, which caters to straight styling. In contrast, the Miss Jessie’s products are all about celebrating and caring for wavy, curly, and kinky hair and offer a completely different beauty aesthetic. In the store aisle, you typically saw greases, hair oils, and other random on-off products, which were manufactured and marketed by companies that could have just as easily made any other commodity, with prices ranging from two dollars for a single item to seven dollars for a set that included a whole relaxer kit. Placing these products right next to the Miss Jessie’s premium-priced, salon-inspired products made little sense. Typically, products in the ethnic section sat cramped on the bottom of the shelf, badly lit, poorly packaged, and gathering dust. They weren’t much of a moneymaker for the retailer, and they didn’t offer much choice to the consumer. The retailers viewed the customer who bought this product as someone who wouldn’t build a big enough shopping basket, so they seemingly didn’t care about her or her needs.
Target was among the leaders to recognize that a change was needed. Target introduced the retail chain shoppers to a new “multicultural” and “textured” hair section that came closest to the Miss Jessie’s philosophy of addressing hair texture rather than skin color. To its credit, Target went all out and secured end-cap placement for its assortment of hair-care products designed for curly hair. In the chain-store retail world, end-cap placement is highly coveted, because end caps showcase certain products and are intended to attract the shopper’s attention without the need to walk into the aisle. It is a subtle but significant statement and a testament to Target’s true commitment to speaking to and respecting all of its guests, and this made Target an attractive partner.
Likewise, from our brownstone in Brooklyn, Miss Jessie’s was making a lot of noise. We were switching the hair images of Eurocentric beauty to highly textured hair on beautiful women of many ethnicities, mainly African-Americans who used to buy relaxer kits. We also put a spotlight on the white and Latina women whose curls we were doing in Bedford-Stuyvesant. By the time we reached Target, our product had been on the market for five years. Paired up with our images were the how-tos, which we shared in the universe free of charge. This knockout combination directly affected the ethnic aisles in mass retail, as well as the beauty salon.
Over time, the Miss Jessie’s philosophy of addressing hair texture without regard to race gained more appreciation and acceptance. Presently, almost all retailers are renaming or have already renamed their “ethnic” hair-care section. Indeed, it is more common to see “multicultural,” “textured,” “natural,” or simply “curly” hair sections, which are now spruced up and designed to entice guests. We take pride in having played a role in this necessary evolution. Now, whether Miss Jessie’s products are placed on end caps or in line, it makes sense that the category of products is speaking to texture.
STROLLING THE AISLES
Putting together that deal with Target was such a whirlwind, it didn’t even seem real. One cold weeknight evening in March 2010, we decided we had to see the store display for ourselves.
“Let’s go check out the Target on Atlantic Avenue,” I told my sister as we were getting ready to leave the office.
We had a full display facing the larger aisles where most of the customer traffic walked through the store, or what is known in the industry as an “end cap,” with attractive images and ad copy surrounding our jars and tubes of hair product. We couldn’t wait to see it. But when we walked into the Brooklyn location, the first thing we noticed was that there was hardly any product on the shelf—it had sold out so fast. Titi and I rearranged our section, displaying the jars so they popped, and had started taking pictures of ourselves when a couple of customers recognized us. We conversed with them, offering hair tips. Soon the aisle was filled with women asking for product prescriptions and advice. It was almost as if we’d set up an impromptu hair clinic right by our end cap.
Experiencing the customers’ reception was confirmation that our presence in Target would be a shot in the arm for an otherwise lifeless category. Sales in the ethnic aisle for relaxers were down about 30 percent at the large retailers. Target wanted to change all of that and had gotten wise to the fact that this lost customer was spending up to fifty-eight dollars for a jar of Baby Buttercreme. “Who knew?” one of its merchandisers exclaimed, thrilled by the dramatic turnaround.
Now this customer was on the mass retailer’s radar in a huge way. Target began to understand that she was willing to make an investment and spend on things that mattered to her. With companies like Miss Jessie’s demonstrating tha
t this customer had money to spend, Target was taking every step to get her to walk through its doors and linger, with better lighting, more creative displays, and greater prominence in the store aisle.
GOOD, BETTER, BEST
We were excited to have caught Target’s attention and to have earned our end-cap placement in stores. Because I tend to stay focused on my own business and have no control over what my competitors do, I am rarely concerned with them. I assumed that when dealing with Target, I would continue to focus on my own business. That changed a bit. I quickly came to appreciate that from time to time Target (like most other retailers) was more interested in maintaining and managing the entire category of products rather than focusing on a particular, individual brand. For the first time, I had to give serious thought to the entire category of natural hair and curly hair–care products, which meant evaluating competitors and understanding competition. It was critical for me to understand Miss Jessie’s value proposition to the entire caterory and leverage that value. What made Miss Jessie’s necessary to the mix? If I could not answer that simple question, then there was a problem. Shelf space is limited and costly, and if a brand cannot earn its keep, then it’s off the shelf and out of the store. Ultimately, I reached the conclusion that every brand in the category—just like Miss Jessie’s—had a function and played a particular role. Target wanted to offer its guests variety. Hence, the good, the better, and the best model. Miss Jessie’s role was the high-performing, salon-inspired, and premium-priced original hair-care product for natural and curly hair. No other brand, then or now, can legitimately make that claim or play that role. As important as Target was to Miss Jessie’s, I understood that Miss Jessie’s was important to Target as well. Including Miss Jessie’s in the selection added credibility to the category in a way that no other brand could do.