Tracee Ellis Ross, Founder and CEO of Pattern Beauty
Tracee Ellis Ross has been known for a long time for wearing and proudly celebrating natural black hair. Over time, what began as a personal journey to nurture her own curly hair turned into a business idea. After a decade of laying the groundwork (research, meetings with chemists, conversations with brand marketers, and meetings with potential partners and investors), Ross launched Pattern Beauty in 2019 to offer a line of products to nourish all types of textured hair. , from curly to curly. to tight texture.
Ross also serves as a diversity and inclusion advisor for retailer Ulta Beauty. She is also the executive producer of The Hair Tales, a new documentary series about black women, beauty and hair, premiering later this year on Hulu and the Oprah Winfrey Network. She recently spoke with McKinsey about the challenges of going to market.
The black consumer has different concerns about how we use beauty products. There hasn’t been a lot of research and data to back up what that looks like for Black-founded retailers and brands. There has to be a lot more listening.
Nyakio Grieco, co-founder of Thirteen Lune and founder of Nyakio and Relevant: Your Skin Seen
Los Angeles-based entrepreneur Nyakio Grieco started beauty products as a child visiting her grandparents in Kenya. She used ground coffee beans from her grandmother’s farm and rubbed them on her skin with cane sugar to remove dryness from her skin. Her grandfather, a healer, taught her how to use cold-pressed natural oils.
In 2002, Grieco launched Nyakio (pronounced Neh-KAY-Oh), his namesake brand dedicated to clean beauty and globally sourced ingredients. He sold his company to Unilever in 2016, and in 2020, Target began selling Nyakio products in stores across the country. That same year, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained massive momentum, Grieco realized that while African-American beauty brands were gaining recognition, there was no single place consumers could buy from them. She co-founded Thirteen Lune, an e-commerce marketplace where 90 percent of beauty brands sold are from black or brown founders and the other 10 percent have a proven commitment to racial diversity and inclusion. In June 2022, she founded the new black beauty brand Relevant: Your Skin Seen.
Grieco spoke with McKinsey about the challenges of gaining access to capital as the founder of Black Beauty.
I truly believe that this industry can be a catalyst to help alleviate systemic racism in this country. Everyone loves beauty, it’s universal and it makes a lot of money. So it’s time to make it as fair as humanly possible.
Lisa Price, founder of Carol’s Daughter
In the early 1990s, Lisa Price, who was working in television production, began experimenting with mixing fragrances and creams in her Brooklyn kitchen. Her hobby became a side hustle when her mother, Carol, encouraged her to sell her wares at a church flea market. Price opened her first boutique in 1999, and over the next several years, she built Carol’s Daughter into a national multimillion-dollar business, in part by turning celebrity clients into investors. In 2014, Price sold Carol’s Daughter to L’Oréal, giving her products an even larger distribution footprint. Today, a hair care product from Carol’s Daughter is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Price still maintains a role as her brand founder at L’Oréal and shared with McKinsey her thoughts on what it was like to be one of the first black founders of a beauty brand and her experience selling it to a larger company.
The biggest challenge of being a black beauty founder is that other people can’t relate to the challenge of being a black founder. You have to find a way to convince people that you know what you’re talking about.
Desirée Rogers, CEO and co-owner of Black Opal and Fashion Fair Cosmetics
Business executive and former White House aide Desirée Rogers has made it her mission in recent years to reinvigorate a pair of trusted legacy black beauty brands. In 2019, she and her business partner and publishing executive friend Cheryl Mayberry McKissack purchased Black Opal, a beauty brand that was founded in 1994 by a Cypriot American chemist to provide better cosmetic and skincare options for his wife. A couple of months later, the duo also bought Fashion Fair Cosmetics from Johnson Publishing Company, where they had both previously worked (Rogers served as CEO for several years after she left the White House). Johnson Publishing Company, which published Ebony and Jet magazines, launched Fashion Fair in 1973 as one of the first and only cosmetics brands to offer makeup for black women of varying skin tones.
Rogers spoke with McKinsey about how the beauty industry needs to better take into account the perspectives of Black consumers.
If we know that a large percentage of Black consumers say they would prefer to shop at a Black-owned or Black-funded business, how do we bring that to life? That [burden] it cannot simply be placed on the shoulders of black-owned businesses and their founders.
Source: www.mckinsey.com