Miss Jessie's: Creating a Successful Business from Scratch---Naturally

by Miko Branch

  Ever since we started focusing on curly hair, we’d been struggling to find the right products to use in our Bed-Stuy salon. Nothing was quite right, and we found ourselves shopping the shelves of drugstores for products that we could combine and mix, using them in some unconventional ways. What we needed was a styling product that was gelatinous, without the tight hold of a gel. The needs of particularly tight-textured curly hair—the type most common among women of color—were specific, because for it to look and feel good, there had to be moisture, shine, and hold all in one product, with just the right amounts of each.

  Identify a need for a product and find a way to create it.

  It was frustrating to go through countless jars and bottles of creams, curl activators, mousses, greases, hair sprays, gels, conditioners, and oils, spending all that money on solutions that just weren’t cutting it. In between salon visits, I wanted our clients to have hair that looked and felt good, in order to maintain their curl and look. So I told Titi: “We need to create our own product. Let’s try and come up with our own exclusive salon formula.” That was how it usually happened. I would come up with an idea, my big sister would take it to the streets, and then the two of us would come together and make it a reality.

  We started by hitting the beauty supply store, buying up varieties of curl activators, grease for texture, hair spray for hold, oil for shine, fragrance, color, and conditioner. We spent our off days and nights mixing various concoctions at the small kitchen table of the one-bedroom apartment Titi occupied on the third floor of our brownstone. Once our day’s work was over, Titi would go off and experiment all night, trying the combinations on her own hair, which was right in the middle in terms of curly type, as a result of our renowned Silkener. It had the thickness and tightness of curl, neither too unattainably slinky nor too kinky, making it the perfect “test case” for our average customer. Once she determined that the formulation was good enough, she would come down to the salon floor and we would test it on our consenting customers to get their feedback. Our clients weren’t shy about telling us what was working and what wasn’t. After that, I would test it on myself, getting up close and personal with our concoctions. It was the beginning of our research and development.

  The problem with these products was that the hard gels were drying and made curls look too dry and crunchy. The alternative, grease, made them look wet and greasy. About three months after we started on this mission, Titi had a breakthrough and came up with a crème formula that was just right.

  Once Titi mastered the texture, we spent more time together at the kitchen table fine-tuning, to get the color and fragrance right. This was almost as important as the function of the product, because it had to appeal to the senses.

  As consumers ourselves, we know that women feel an emotional connection to their beauty products, and scent is such a critical component in boosting mood. Put simply, it had to smell yummy.

  It also had to smell different from the usual brands marketed to women of color. Typically, these products had scents heavy on the bergamot or sulfur, or sweet fragrances such as coconut or cherry, which smelled more like cough syrup. It was a cliché, and we wanted to give our customers another option. We sniffed a million scents before we finally chose more of a fresh and fruity smell. Still delectable, with its food association, but unusual. And unlike everything else on the market. It was strong and distinctive; women either loved it or hated it. But many of our fans later reported that it had an almost aphrodisiac effect on their husbands and boyfriends, which couldn’t be a bad thing!

  Customers should associate your product with something delicious.

  The next and final element was the color. One of the things we used to notice about Miss Jessie: When she was mixing a cake batter or putting together a big Sunday meal, she was always big on presentation. Every detail, from how that cake was frosted to the way those sweet potatoes were spooned onto a platter, mattered. The food we ate not only had to taste good, it had to look pretty. We took that lesson and applied it to our formulation when we came up with a beautiful violet color. Again, it was a completely different look from anything already out there for curly hair.

  Finally, with those pieces of the puzzle perfected, Titi had cracked the code. We were both so excited, we couldn’t get back to sleep. We knew we had it.

  Two

  DEEP ROOTS

  You don’t choose your family.

  They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.

  —DESMOND TUTU

  When I think back to our early childhood, growing up in Jamaica, Queens, in the seventies, long, shining, thick, straight hair is what I remember most. Our Japanese-American mother wore her jet-black crowning glory parted in the middle and cascading like velvet curtains halfway down her back. She used to wash it just about every day with Herbal Essences shampoo—the original emerald-green version in the bottle with the image of the woman in the Garden of Eden. Even now, when I come across that earthy, woodsy scent, it evokes memories of my stunning young mother—a cool hippie beauty—as she swung her wet hair from side to side to let it air-dry.

  Our mother was my childhood ideal. I know most children remember their mothers as being beautiful, but those faded old photographs confirm it. She was exquisite, with luminous yellow skin and almond-shaped eyes framed by perfectly arched eyebrows. I remember her clicking around in high heels to heighten her perfectly proportioned four-foot-eleven frame. Her nails were sometimes painted red, her outfits occasionally accented with a silk scarf or a floppy hat. My mother wore very little makeup other than a swipe of lipstick and some blush if she was going out. She didn’t need to, because her striking and delicate features, set in a heart-shaped face with high cheekbones and a rosebud mouth, were reminiscent of an Eastern version of Vivien Leigh in her heyday.

  Of course, back then I didn’t draw that comparison. To Titi and me, our mother looked exactly like the curvaceous Asian woman who danced on Soul Train—Cheryl Song. It was as if this foxy lady on the television were our mother’s twin! The two of us used to get excited when Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff’s “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” theme song for Soul Train came on. We’d run into the living room and dance to the Jackson Five, Gladys Knight, and the Spinners, our father teaching us all of his moves. But the best part was watching Cheryl Song hustle down the Soul Train line in front of the camera, swinging that hair back and forth. It made me feel proud to think we had our very own version of the dancer right there at home.

  HARD TO HOLD

  When my mother was at home, she was always this quiet, slightly aloof figure, more absent than present, always going off to work or school or her Buddhist group. We knew she loved us, but that warmth was missing, and we never quite felt like we could touch her. Instead, she was this elusive figure who floated in and out of our lives—an unattainable beauty in every sense.

  That’s why any attention we got from her felt extra good. It was girl time, and we could never get enough of it. Titi and I especially loved it when she braided our hair, decorating it with ornaments and colored beads. She used to buy Butterick patterns to sew matching outfits for our parties and school fashion shows, and they made us feel so pretty. She even made us jewelry by bending a fork into a funky bracelet, which we wore with pride. Our mother’s attention was what we craved, especially her gentle touch when handling our unruly, thick-textured hair—the opposite of hers.

  Typically, it was Daddy who took on the hair and wardrobe job in the mornings. It fell on him to get Titi and me ready for day care—this big man with big hands who just didn’t have the skills. He used to pick out our kinks with a metal pick that had a wooden handle, and it hurt like hell when he pulled it through our hair, stinging our tender scalps. Titi, whose hair is thicker and denser than mine, was extremely tender-headed, and he used to hit her with the wooden part of the pick to stop her from crying and ducking. While he was busy with my sister, I used to try to beat him to it, rushing into the bathroom to wet and gr
ease down my hair and pull it into two pigtails to avoid his torture—hence my early interest in hairstyling. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Because our father didn’t know what to do with all that hair, we turned up in day care with these huge Afros. At the time, it was embarrassing.

  “You better stop that crying,” he told us one morning as he was dropping us off for the day.

  “But we look so stupid, Daddy,” I told him, sniffling. “Everybody is going to tease us.”

  “That’s all right—it’s the style! Everybody who knows what’s happening wears a ’fro,” he said, trying to pass his handiwork off as style.

  We knew better, even then. Titi let it roll off, but I desperately wanted to be that perfectly groomed little girl. I wanted to look like my early ideals of beauty and style: Donna Summer, Lola Falana, Cher, Diana Ross, Thelma from the TV show Good Times, and of course, my mother. At the time, I didn’t fully understand my multi-textured curly and kinky hair from my mixed-race heritage as the blessing it was; I was too preoccupied with wanting to look like my mother.

  AN UNUSUAL MIXTURE

  That unconventional upbringing truly was a gift, allowing Titi and me to form opinions and an aesthetic sense that stood apart, even when we were children. Our worldview was shaped by two strong and distinct personalities: our parents’. Our father, Jimmy Branch, a six-one, handsome, and charismatic black man, met our mother, Karen Matsumoto, in the late sixties in California at a taco stand. She was just sixteen going on seventeen, the second-generation daughter of a protective and traditional Japanese-American family. Shy, ethereal, and artistic, our mother captivated our father from the jump with her beauty and intellect. At twenty-four, he had been something of a ladies’ man who usually went for much older and more sophisticated women, but he fell hard for this strange and stunning young woman.

  Even in the free-loving days of flower power, their mixed-race romance broke all the rules. When our mother brought our father to her parents’ house for the first and last time, her uncle kicked her right in front of him.

  About a year after they met, while they were still in Los Angeles, Daddy’s young bride got pregnant with Titi. They moved east to have the baby, and a year and a half later, when our mother was just twenty, I was born. Even our names were different from the norm. Our mother wanted to pick something of African origin for her firstborn, so she chose the Nigerian name Titi, after a beautiful African girl who was her friend in college. It was typical of the thoughtfulness our mother put into everything she did. She loved the uniqueness of the sound of that name, as well as its meaning, which, according to her friend, was “wisdom,” although other translations included “little flower.” She picked Cree for Titi’s middle name. As she explained to us later, “Choosing a Native American tribe’s name was to give a connection to this land.”

  For the same reason, my own middle name is Shawnee. But since Titi had been given an African name, our mother wanted to give me a name of Japanese origin. She chose Miko for its sound and uniqueness. As she told me recently, “In Japanese, the same-sounding word can have a different meaning depending on the kanji character with which it is written. One meaning for Miko could be ‘beautiful child’ or ‘female shaman.’” Apparently the name was typical of the women who served in Shinto shrines.

  We were proud of our African-American/Japanese-American heritage. Needless to say, there weren’t a lot of Titis or Mikos running around our neighborhood or schools. Nothing about my sister and me blended in, but we never felt the need to be followers. Our parents certainly weren’t.

  Incorporate your unique life story into your business dreams.

  EARLY STRUGGLES

  When I think about our parents in the first few years of their marriage, I can’t help but think of that song “I Got You Babe,” by Sonny and Cher: “They say our love won’t pay the rent.” Mommy and Daddy had love, and they had each other, but not much else. Financially it was tough, because Daddy left high school early to join the air force, served his time, and got out without two dimes to rub together. Then he fell in love and started a family before he had the means to support us. But he always knew how to survive. Although he eventually became an educated man, he had hustle and learned his survival skills from the street, watching the old cats play dice and listening carefully to what they had to say. He wasn’t into anything illegal, but he kept his eyes and ears open for the next opportunity.

  Not that he was consistent with his hustle. For all his fierce independence, Daddy did not always get money to pay for the kind of lifestyle he wanted for us. When we were babies, our father took us all to Poughkeepsie to Miss Jessie’s house to get a home-cooked meal. In fact, I was born in Poughkeepsie, and the three of us—me, Titi, and our mother—lived with Miss Jessie for six months. Daddy stayed in the city during the week, because that was where he could find the opportunities, working as an insurance adjuster and driving cabs.

  When we rejoined our father in New York, we continued to visit our grandmother a lot. He wanted to expose us to what he’d had, growing up in a home—a more wholesome and safe environment, a place where we could run around outside without worry. We’d been living on 137th Street in Harlem, when unemployment was high and muggings were commonplace.

  It was a precarious start, but we didn’t mind all the shuffling back and forth. Those early years around Miss Jessie’s kitchen table were precious to us. “You gotta have common sense, remember that. Always use that God-given common sense,” Miss Jessie made sure to tell us at every opportunity.

  Our grandmother was old-school in the best possible way: a refined Southern belle who was an incredible homemaker. She didn’t just fill us up with food; she made it her mission to fill us up with love and wisdom. It was the beginning of a huge role that our grandmother would come to play in our lives.

  DADDY KNOWS BEST

  Our father was the other dominant force. Daddy never babied us, even when we were babies. When we fell, he watched to make sure we got back up. When we were bad, he was tough, even resorting to the occasional ass-whooping to keep us in line. My sister and I had to make our own beds, put away our own toys, and take some responsibility for ourselves. Of course, he cared for us, making sure we were safe and had money for food (Mommy almost always did the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and food shopping). But Daddy treated us like little people, having real conversations with us about what to expect from life, and how we should conduct ourselves as young ladies. Most of all, he’d remind us to be independent. From the time we could crawl and put sentences together, he instilled that in us. It was like his mantra. “Miko, y’all got to understand that you should never depend on anybody. Always be independent,” he told me. It sounded like a broken record to us at the time, but now, as a mother myself, I understand what our father was feeling. He was terrified. All around us were single moms struggling on their own, with babies to feed and husbands or boyfriends who’d left them. In the neighborhoods where we grew up, households where the men were around and providing for their families was not the norm. Daddy constantly worried that we’d become women who would depend on a man.

  “You’ll wind up alone, with no skills and no money, living in subsidized housing and buying groceries with food stamps.

  “Nobody’s an island, but at the end of the day, it’s got to come through you,” he told us. “Be self-sufficient; at least start from that point. You don’t have to be a follower when you can do something for yourself.”

  “Need more; gotta have” was another one of his favorite sayings, echoing Miss Jessie, who always talked about the necessity of getting out there and earning the necessities and luxuries of life. She had no tolerance for entitled people who asked for things but weren’t willing to work for them, and neither did our father. That’s why, when Titi and I were six and five and we wanted to buy a plastic wading pool to cool off in, we ran a lemonade stand. That summer we raised twenty-five dollars—a fortune—to buy the pool, which was decorated with red and blue sailboats. Earnin
g what you get was an important lesson for us. When Titi finally took the plunge in our backyard, it was a celebration. We’d never felt more pride of ownership.

  Daddy was always striving to do better for himself and for us. It was a matter of pride and self-respect. That’s why he was determined to buy a house for his family. Never afraid to take a risk, he waited until he and our mother got to the closing to tell the owners he had less than what they’d agreed to for the closing costs. Though it was a tactic to get the final number down, he truly did not have the money. The owners, desperate to close, agreed, and we moved to 127th Street between Linden Boulevard and 111th Avenue in South Ozone Park/Jamaica in the early seventies. At first it was a predominantly white, lower-middle-class neighborhood, featuring rows of tract houses with neatly manicured front lawns bordered by wrought-iron fences. Before long, the demographics changed to mostly black and Hispanic. It was safe enough, and a much better place to raise a family than Harlem at the time.

  Poor as they were, our parents were happy and carefree in those days, socializing with friends and throwing parties on weekends for no reason other than to dance and engage in interesting conversation. By then, our mother was studying at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan while our father, who doted on her, financed her education as well as his own. It was an environment of creativity, spontaneity, and love. Mommy and Daddy were hippies of a sort, always wearing musk and patchouli oil and burning incense, although anyone who walked into our home could tell they had a kind of modern style.

  Our Queens home was sparse, simple, and clean. My mother’s vibrant abstract art hung on the walls, and the few items of furniture—two modern brown couches, a three-seater and a two-seater, and a large chrome reach-over lamp like the kind that’s retro-cool now. The whole arrangement was tied together with a large piece of jewel-green satin fabric that covered the ceiling in a way that was typical of my mother’s minimalist Japanese aesthetic. The kitchen was decorated in elaborate wallpaper. I still have those silver, red, and black geometric shapes etched in my mind. Brick-red wooden benches sat in the nook for our rectangular kitchen table, with a modern lighting fixture hanging above. Our parents’ taste and resourcefulness made us look as if we had money. Our home was different, minimalist and cool. When everyone else’s house was hooked up with mirrored walls and plastic-covered furniture, we had another idea of what was stylish and beautiful.