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

by Miko Branch

  Feel the pulse. Be close enough to your customer to know exactly what she’s thinking, what she needs to hear, and how she’s evolving.

  We didn’t even have to say anything. The visuals were powerful enough. And each time we added a picture, it sparked endless dialogue online. We weren’t participating in the conversation, but we were stimulating it. Every week we’d upload dozens of pictures, and whenever someone had something negative to say about us, we’d have the hard evidence of our results to prove them wrong. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. We’d gone viral before the marketing professionals had even invented the term!

  One of the most talked-about issues on the boards was our pricing. Somehow the word “natural” connoted low prices to these women. They didn’t realize that treating and styling natural hair is four times the labor. Although it was a labor of love, we just needed to be compensated accordingly, to continue to feel good and not resent our new specialty. It made a few of our customers angry, although it never seemed to deter them from seeking out our services. On our end, there was no denying the work involved, but you would have thought from some of their reactions that we were trying to fleece them. Others were just happy to learn about effective ways to manage and style their hair. We watched these faithful Curve customers’ hair grow out curlier and curlier. It was gratifying: exactly the confirmation we needed to stay the course and not mind the naysayers.

  THE SPEAKEASY

  The majority of our clients were an incredible and diverse group of women, many of whom have become lifelong friends. Women in advertising, media, the arts, even finance were coming to us. Our early customers were mostly educated professional types who were looking for something they couldn’t get anywhere else—a chance to become better versions of themselves, with healthy, well-groomed hair. One of those women was Emma Robinson, a radio and communications executive at Public Radio Corporations.

  Emma had been searching for the right salon for a couple of years before she came to us. She’d been looking for a curly or wash-and-go look and had tried out a texturizer at another very popular salon that catered to upscale black hair care in New York City. It was the first time she’d had any kind of major chemical treatment since she was sixteen, and she rocked that look for a while, but it didn’t feel exactly right to her. When she saw an article about us in Essence magazine, she decided to give us a try.

  By the time Emma got to my chair, she was growing out the texturizer, and all I could see was damage. It was shoulder-length but not in good condition.

  “Hey, you know, if you want a good, uniform curl, we’re going to have to cut,” I advised her.

  Understandably, Emma was resistant to the idea. It can be a heartbreaking decision, because as women, we tend to associate the length of our hair with our femininity. I empathized, because my own transition from relaxed to naturally curly had been rough. I was so intent on avoiding the Big Chop that I had clung to a ratty, curly weave for far too long. Cutting off all that hair can be like losing a limb, and the thought of such a dramatic change sends many of my clients into a panic.

  “I want to keep the length,” she insisted. “This is my look.”

  “Okay, but I just want to warn you, the results will be mixed—curly with straight ends,” I told her. “It’s important that you get back your healthy hair first.”

  Emma allowed me to trim a little, but she wasn’t completely satisfied, and I could sense her frustration. That was why I wanted to make it clear to her what needed to be done and what she could expect if we did less. When my clients don’t take my advice, I can’t do my best work, but they’re not always ready. It’s a process, and it takes patience as well as a long-term vision to reach a hair goal.

  When your hair doesn’t feel right, you don’t feel right. Emma had always wanted that soft but natural curl. She was a woman who’d been completely natural since she was a teenager. She’d done the braids and cornrows. She’d even done thread wraps, where you wrap silk thread or cotton around your locks. It was an earthy African look and a way to wear her hair as a kind of political statement. Emma comes from that artistic and intellectual world, running African-American programming for radio, and her hair matched her lifestyle and social views. Her hair was expressing her creativity, but as she told me years later, “at some point I crossed over into the belief that hair is just an accessory, and that who you are politically and socially is not necessarily measured by clothes or hair but the person you are.”

  Emma felt secure enough in herself to know that nothing she did externally would change who she was. Hair became something she could have fun with, a way to look and feel great beyond any statement. She’d moved beyond the angst of those ladies in the chat rooms, because she had the maturity and wisdom to know that being a polished and styled professional woman didn’t take away from what she stood for. That’s why she came back, ready, willing, and able to do the Big Chop. Luckily, she had a considerable amount of new growth. As a result, she was thrilled with the final cut. She looked fresh and pretty—her curls popped!

  I was pleased when Emma came back. She was cautious and analytical, like me: a fellow traveler. Over the years, she became part of a group of interesting women who would sit around our brownstone parlor while waiting for our services, enjoying the snacks and drinks we laid out, listening to jazz, gospel, soul, R&B, or whatever we were playing on the stereo, and talking about life in general. Our Bed-Stuy parlor had transformed into an old-school salon—not the hair kind but similar to the places they had back in the day in Paris, those society ladies’ homes where artists and thinkers would get together and have serious conversations. Another client—inspired, I guess, by our restored-brownstone decor—compared us to a Prohibition-era speakeasy, a happening place that you had to be in the know in order to find.

  There was something thrilling about seeing the caliber of women embracing what Titi and I were doing. There was a cool factor to the environment we’d created, and these were the insiders who got us.

  “I love the underground feel of this place,” Emma once told me. “It feels like we are part of something significant.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  “I mean, innovations in African-American women’s hair have been few and far between. This is the third time someone has created a leap in manipulating hair, from straight, to Afro, and now this natural curl. By giving women the tools to do this, you have spearheaded the next big wave in our culture.”

  Emma was right. Over a couple of years, we had become a destination, and women were coming to us from as far away as England, Africa, the Caribbean, and Brazil, as word spread about the solutions we were offering and the undeniable results. As Titi and I looked around at the hundreds of women we served each month, we began to realize that this movement was by no means confined to one ethnicity. Curve’s impact went far beyond the specialized market we’d originally envisioned. Black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Jewish, Caucasian—women of all races and nationalities were part of a core group of loyal customers, and their curly-textured hair was the fiber that united them.

  A case in point was Michelle Breyer, the founder of NaturallyCurly.com and now a dear friend. A nice Jewish woman with a head of beautifully coiled hair, Michelle had spent most of her youth trying to straighten the life out of it.

  “I used to live in fear of people knowing how curly my hair was,” Michelle shared with us recently. “Foggy weather would ruin my day.”

  Like a lot of us, Michelle grew up at the mercy of her hair, feeling the pressure to conform to beauty ideals like Christie Brinkley, Cheryl Tiegs, and Farrah Fawcett. She was constantly fighting what she was born with, and there were days she didn’t even want to leave the house.

  Frustrated that there was nothing out there for women like her, like us, Michelle, a journalist, decided to launch NaturallyCurly in 2000 as a side hustle, and the website rapidly developed an international following. A year later, we came along, arming women with information and tools
that could empower them. We didn’t simply tell them what could be done, we showed them.

  Be open to every kind of customer. Catering to a broader demographic can reap unexpected rewards.

  But the advice didn’t come just from us. Our salon became a kind of lab where our customers could sit with each other to exchange ideas and related experiences. Women with similar hair types would find their hair twins and swap tips on products and home maintenance. The volume of women we saw revealed certain trends and patterns in hair issues, and the looks they were trying to achieve foretold the next wave of hair fashion. They told us what products they bought off the shelf, what worked and what didn’t. We listened carefully, learning more in each conversation about our customers’ different hair challenges and filing away the feedback for future use.

  Titi and I were paying attention to the fact that we needed more reliable products to support this thrust of clients with specific needs. We were mixing and matching existing products on the market, but nothing was quite right. It was a months-long process that took time and effort on top of running the salon. But knowing we were on the right path kept us motivated. We had something in mind, something that would transform the lives of not just our salon customers but curly-haired women worldwide.

  Eight

  THE BEST DAMN CURL CRÈME, PERIOD!

  Go against the rules or ignore the rules.

  That is what invention is about.

  —HELEN FRANKENTHALER

  Hearing the roar of the engine as the truck pulled up to the curb, ready to handle our business, everyone in the house at 120 Hancock Street sprang into action.

  “Ti-tiiiii, they’re here!” I screamed up to the fourth floor.

  “I’m coming down now! Where are my gloves so I can lift those boxes?” Titi shouted. “Come on, find that hand truck so we can start loading. Let’s go, let’s go!”

  We had it down to a science, mobilizing our little army of five helpers to load and unload the truck in half an hour. Our whole day revolved around getting these orders filled. It was literally a cottage industry in the heart of Brooklyn’s urban landscape.

  Anyone walking into our brownstone in those days would have been hit with a waft of the most intoxicating scents: vanilla, peppermint, coconut, berries, and tropical fruits. But what they would have seen was quite a contrast from what these lush scents conjured up. The exposed brick walls of our brownstone’s cellar had been painted white for extra brightness and set up specifically to handle our daily domestic production, with separate staging areas for each phase. In the back of the room, Titi, our crew, and I stood for hours at a counter, mixing batches of curl magic with a row of four industrial-grade Hobart mixers. Then we moved the tubs of product to a table in the middle, pouring the mixture into a Simplex machine, filling jar after jar with precisely measured amounts.

  So that we could sit up close to our work, we used wood and metal school chairs that we’d retrieved from a trash dump, and we cut the legs off long metal industrial tables. This ensured that our process was exact, avoided spillage, and saved our backs from giving out while pouring heavy buckets of cream into the jar fillers.

  Once the filling was done, the minimal assembly line moved to a work area in the front, where we had our label machine set up. After all caps were shut tight, we carefully affixed a label to each jar by hand, packaging them up way before orders came in so we wouldn’t get overwhelmed if we had a surge in orders on a particular day. Each week, at our peak, we had to get about a thousand jars ready to go.

  It was 2005, a little over a year into production of Curly Pudding, our naturally curly hairstyling product that was our heaviest formulation, aimed at a tighter-coiled texture, and our most popular at the time. We were producing a similar but different formulation called Curly Meringue, a medium-weight hold and the first in our series of “heavier curl” crèmes for Miss Jessie’s stylers, which helped hold curls in place longer for wash-and-go curly styles, rod sets, and two-strand twists (see glossary at the back for definitions and a complete list of product descriptions). That year we were also producing Curly Buttercreme, to style, soften, and moisturize dry-textured hair, keeping it healthy. Customers loved its tingling scalp sensation, as well as the natural sheen the product gave to hair.

  Invest in what you need. You must have the proper tools when running a business. Shortcuts will lead to more labor and less efficiency, increasing operational costs.

  We were manufacturing a lot of product from a basement operation. Within a matter of months since the creation of our first product, our brownstone had turned into a center of operations for manufacturing, distribution, order fulfillment, and shipping.

  We didn’t outsource any part of the process and had no one but ourselves to deal with the incoming email orders (and we accepted payment via PayPal): When we were starting up our own business, we did whatever it took with whatever resources we had. No one could tell us it couldn’t be done, and not knowing any better was exactly why we worked day and night to make our dreams materialize. We did it all, and repeated each process day after day, with barely enough time to come up for air, because those UPS trucks kept on coming. The pickups and deliveries occurred several times a week.

  Once they were parked outside, we had to be ready. And quick. The last thing we wanted was an extended scene, so we went to great lengths to avoid attracting too much attention. The less people knew about our business, the better.

  ROUGH DIAMOND

  The folks on our street were harmless, even silently protective of the nice sisters who’d moved in two years earlier. They liked that we were different, appearing to be young women from the other side of the tracks, and that we chose to live in this neighborhood. We had always assumed that gave us instant acceptance by a community of people who’d been living on this stately but forgotten block of brownstones for generations. The neighborhood had a few pockets like this—some gems amid the ruins of urban decay—that showed the pride and dignity of the longtime residents, who worked hard to preserve these grand old houses, some of which were even mansions. There was a certain grace about parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant, and that was what had drawn us there. We always knew it was a diamond in the rough with lots of potential.

  Bedford-Stuyvesant was once the largest ghetto in North America. Beyond Hancock and a handful of other streets, the blocks were sketchy. We had to put bars on the windows of the first floor because the first year we moved in, someone tried to break in; our dog, Rheggi Bear, barked his ass off while we slept, scaring away our intruder. As soon as we went downstairs and saw that the doorknob was broken off, we knew what was up, and shifted into high alert.

  A Complete Guide from Concept to Marketplace

  1. Once you’ve found that big idea, set the standard for quality and innovation.

  2. Source only the best possible ingredients or components to ensure that you are not just the first to market but the best. This will ensure that when the competition catches on, you will keep your customer’s loyalty.

  3. Research, research, research! Use circles of your friends, peers, clients, whomever you are targeting, as an informal testing lab. Get honest feedback and use it.

  4. 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.

  5. When you have your formula or prototype ready, protect your intellectual property! Patent it. Research what type of patent or patents your product needs, and do the paperwork. When you are ready to go to a manufacturer, you will own the formula and be able to take it with you anywhere.

  6. As you get ready to launch, use grassroots marketing to get the word out. Let your brand’s reputation build by word of mouth.

  7. Be witty and informational in your packaging.

  8. Leverage social media and start building personal relationships with smaller vendors who will carry your product.

  9. Send out press releases and fliers to every media outlet y
ou can think of. A little free PR, such as a glowing write-up in a trade or consumer publication, can take your start-up to the next level.

  When we first moved to the area, it was mostly empty lots, tagged and grimy cement walls, burned-out buildings, random auto shops, and corner bodegas. Many of the once-stately brownstones had been turned into rooming houses, stripped of their historic period detail, converted to rent out rooms that would pay the mortgage. In addition to the black folks who’d migrated from the South decades earlier, the area was full of immigrants from the Middle East, the West Indies, and Africa—street vendors selling incense and CDs—as well as Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Although it was a known area in New York for low-income occupants, Bed-Stuy made up one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the country. The projects, including the Marcy Houses (former home of Jay-Z), were not far from us, on Nostrand Avenue, and questionable characters were always loitering on Bedford Avenue and Fulton Street, so we had to keep our operation on the down-low. Year by year, the neighborhood was improving, but if word had spread that we had a flourishing business going on right in the ’hood, who knew what could have happened.

  Be aware of your surroundings and invest in security. Small-business owners have too much to lose.

  Early on, we took our last savings to invest in a top-shelf security system with cameras and alarms at every entrance and window, in case of another break-in. It wasn’t just that our operation was valuable. We were scared to death because we were alone, with no man present and with a little baby in the house; we had to do all we could to protect ourselves.

  LACE CURTAINS

  There were too many eyeballs on us as it was. On that wet afternoon in April, as we maneuvered the hand truck up the stairs from the basement entrance of our house, careful not to drop any of the packages, our neighbors were already gathering on their stoops or sliding back their curtains to check out what we were doing. We noticed Maurice, who lived next door, standing in his usual spot at his front window on the second floor, with his peppered white hair, wearing a stained white undershirt, shorts, and gray slippers, watching us with curious eyes. Ours was a quiet, leafy street, with a good handful of folks who were unemployed and stayed home all day. It wasn’t a stretch to say we’d become their daily entertainment. Certainly, they were intrigued about what was going on, although thankfully, nobody ever asked.