Meet the Woman Who Started a Drybar for Women With Natural Hair
After a successful run working in climbing the corporate ladder, Folake Oguntebi decided it was time to try something else. In her many years in offices, she’d often lamented the lack of a quick-service salon that catered to women who want to embrace their natural hair. Taking years of experience she’d gathered while working in marketing, she decided to reinvent textured hair care with GoodHair Salon, which offers all natural, nontoxic products to keep your hair healthy, service in under two hours, online booking, and extended hours to accommodate overextended professional women.
Oguntebi partnered with Angela Stevens, senior creative stylist and educational adviser (who also stars in WE TV’s L.A. Hair), and celebrity stylist and Beyoncé hair-whisperer Kim Kimble. GoodHair is currently a pop-up salon in midtown until August 8, with plans to open a brick-and-mortar salon in 2016. We sat down with Oguntebi and Stevens to find out how they went about starting a business from the ground up, why hair care for natural hair is necessary, and what they hope women can learn fromGoodHair Salon.
The notion behind the phrase good hair has deep, negative connotations in the black community, so why name your salon that?
Folake Oguntebi: I had a lot of hesitation around it for that very reason. But I have a good friend who was part of the crowdfunding campaign; I told her I just liked the name, I think it’s cool — but she convinced me that we could make this more about changing the way people define good hair. There is so much enthusiasm around embracing your hair’s natural texture is, whether it’s toward the right of the chart or somewhere in the middle or not. It just felt like an awesome opportunity to be provocative, but in a way that hopefully is encouraging.
You had a hard time with funding and ended up using crowdfunding. What was it like trying to pitch this to investors?
F.O.: I didn’t want to put the idea out there without having enough together so I think I was a little hesitant. Most of the people who I think would fund this are white men who are like, “So two hours or an hour and a half is good when you’re going to get your hair done and what’s this natural hair care mean?” And there’s definitely a lot of explaining the process and why it matters. Certain hair types are much more complicated to deal with than others. It’s not the same experience that people are having when you just walk in off the street to a barbershop or to a hair salon.
When you exceeded your initial goal of $15,000 and raised over $17,000, what was it like to receive that overwhelming support from women saying, “We obviously do believe in this and this is something that we need?”
F.O.: It was super-validating to have the support come from our friends and families who really believed in this idea! We received good advice that you need to make sure whatever goal you set for yourself, you come up with a third of what you can raise in advance. So we raised five of that 15,000 before we actually even launched. I’m monitoring the appointments that come in and I don’t know 90 percent of the people, and that’s another really powerful, validating proof for it, because now we are really able to say that this isn’t just my friends and supporters — this is every woman.
Read More at NYMag.com
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