00:00Hi, I'm Michelle Breyer and I co-founded NaturallyCurly.com with my dear friend Gretchen Heber.
00:06NaturallyCurly is 15 years old this month, so we thought it was a perfect time to share our story
00:11with you. This is Draw My Life, the story of NaturallyCurly.com. In 1998, Gretchen and I
00:19worked at the Statesman here in Austin, Texas. It was a newspaper. We were just two curly girls who
00:25would complain about our hair all the time. One day, at a brunch, a conversation with one of
00:30our straight-haired colleagues launched us into a full-on griping session about the haircuts we
00:35couldn't have, the products that wouldn't work. Finally, another colleague overheard us and said,
00:41do you always talk about your hair this much? Uh, yeah, we said, and he suggested we start a
00:47website about it. Remember, this is back in 1998. Blogs didn't even exist back then.
00:55So we did a Google search. Fun fact, Google launched the same month as we did,
00:59and there was nothing out there. That's when Gretchen and I said, yeah, let's do it.
01:04At a bar one night, we scribbled ideas out on cocktail napkins. We could have a product section.
01:09We could do this. We could do that. My neighbor's 13-year-old son had just learned how to do websites,
01:14so we paid him $100 to design the very first version of NaturallyCurly.com.
01:19All we knew was that we really wanted a logo with curly hair that moved, and that's how Frida,
01:25our first logo, was born. When NaturallyCurly launched, we'd go to the beauty section to buy
01:32products to review. There weren't really any products marketed for curly, so we just bought
01:36products that we knew worked for our hair. It was actually my mother who came up with a curl rating
01:42system. So every time you rate that conditioner one to five curls, you can thank mom. This little
01:48hobby of ours got thousands of hits almost immediately. My favorite thing to do was log
01:53on every day and see where the views were coming from. One of the first things we started with the
02:00website was Curltalk, our discussion board. The forum was very basic, but it got a ton of traffic.
02:07Curlies had a lot of questions. They logged on from all over the world with the same kind of
02:12conversations that Gretchen and I had had when the site started. I really don't think we had any
02:16clue that we were helping to create a niche in the industry. So the first year and a half,
02:23we worked on NaturallyCurly.com when we could, at night, in the morning, sometimes during work hours.
02:30I did the PR myself. Because I was a reporter, I knew what publications would find interesting.
02:37Luckily, a curly hair website was still a weird enough idea that magazines like Allure and People
02:42picked up the idea and wrote about us. We were sort of making a name for ourselves.
02:48I could call up a company like KMS and they would send us boxes of product to review for free.
02:53Isn't that what every curly girl dreams about? Free product?
02:57Suddenly, more boxes from more brands were coming in. It was like the best
03:01dream in the world, like a kid in a candy store. But we never saw it as a business.
03:05NaturallyCurly.com was a place to go for information and inspiration. At the most,
03:10we thought we'd sell a couple of t-shirts. Our online forum was creating this amazing community.
03:16A lot of those early Curltalkers have gone on to start their own blogs, including Curly Nikki and
03:20naturality. Another Curltalker named Jess would share her love-hate relationship with her bright
03:26red curly hair and started experimenting with do-it-yourself flaxseed gel recipes.
03:32Other members of the board loved her recipe and asked her to sell them. We now know and love her
03:37as Jessicurl, creator of many of our Holy Grail products. This was truly a grassroots effort.
03:43Gretchen and I, and people like us, people like Jessicurl and Curly Hair Solutions and Kinky Curly,
03:50were helping to create a curly hair industry. We were showing the world that curly hair was a force
03:55to be reckoned with. We didn't realize it at the time, but AG was on Curltalk and used some of our
04:01feedback to develop Recoil, one of the top curly hair products around. AG agreed that even though it
04:07was a salon-only brand, they would let Naturally Curly sell it. That was a huge move for us. We had
04:13never sold product before. We scraped together the money and luckily that same week we were quoted in
04:22the New York Times style section and orders started pouring in. I personally delivered shipments to the
04:29post office. Everyone knew us all over there. It went from five boxes to ten boxes to using a dolly to
04:36wheel them in, to using a huge basket to wheel them in, to using two baskets to wheel them in.
04:41Soon enough, the post office had to pick up the packages at Gretchen's house. Curl Mart had taken
04:46off. For a lot of these solid brands like Jessicurl and Diva and Miss Jessie's, we were the first place
04:52besides their own website that they sold product. It had gotten to the point where we couldn't ship
04:56the orders ourselves. So Gretchen's babysitter, Julissa, was our very first employee. Julissa still works at
05:03Curl Mart today and we love her so much. A lot of the best ideas at NaturallyCurly.com have come from
05:10our employees and our community. Take our Curly cocktails for example. My friend Suze, you probably
05:16know her as Curly Suze, overheard me talking to a Ladies Home Journal editor. I was giving her
05:21suggestions for different cocktails she could use on her hair. She said, why don't we create these
05:26cocktails for people on Curl Mart and we could give them fun names like Curltini and Curl and Tonic.
05:32And the cocktails were born and they have been one of our most successful products on Curl Mart.
05:37By 2005, Naturally Curly was taking over Gretchen's house. It was time to make a change.
05:43We needed office space. So we rented a tiny little office. Gretchen and I would bump into each other
05:50if we backed up our chairs. We had one room dedicated to Curl Mart. Soon we were knocking down
05:56walls going into the office next to ours and within a couple of years we had gone into the offices
06:01next to those and we had taken over the entire floor. Now remember, we were still working at the
06:07local newspaper and we have families, growing families. We were part-time NaturallyCurly but part-time
06:13was becoming 40, 50, 60 hours a week. Something had to give. There was a decision to be made. Do we do this
06:21full-time? Do we dive off that cliff? Do we take a chance? Our newspaper jobs were so secure but it
06:28was definitely holding us back.
06:29We bootstrapped NaturallyCurly for a long time but there were a lot of ideas we had and things we
06:36wanted to do and people we needed to hire. So it was time to raise some money. We were lucky that there
06:41was an angel network in Texas and they actually believed in Curly hair and thought it could be a
06:45good business. With this money we were able to hire some great talent including our amazing CEO Krista Bailey.
06:54Yes, she has straight hair but she has a curly heart. We continued to grow adding new people,
07:00developers and designers and writers. In 2009 we thought it was important to create a community
07:07for the stylists, the people who were on our site every day, changing lives, giving great haircuts.
07:14They wanted a place for people like them. Around 2010 we started hearing more about Curly Nikki. She was
07:21a long time curl talker and she had gone off and created an amazing blog. She was working out of one
07:27room in her house in Raleigh, Durham pregnant with Gia and we decided to partner up. We realized that we
07:35could provide a lot of resources to her and she would be an excellent addition to the Texture Media Network.
07:40Over the last 15 years we've made a lot of waves. We've been on the front page of USA Today boycotting
07:48the Princess Diaries. We've taken on the millionaire matchmaker and her assertion that curly girls can't
07:56get men. We've been in newspapers and TV and magazines. Looking back 15 years ago we never would have imagined we
08:05would have grown to where we are today with 20 employees and writers around the world and more than 3 million
08:11people a month that come to Texture Media Network to get information about their hair. We hear stories about
08:19how we've helped inspire people to wear their hair curly and how we help them feel good about themselves for
08:24the first time in their life. We've helped companies create products for the curly world. I'm so grateful that 15 years
08:32later we are still here and we have everybody in this community to thank for that. The next generation
08:38is adding their mark to NaturallyCurly.com with videos and Instagram accounts and there are
08:44Curlys born every day who still need help. There are people who still don't know about us and that's great.
08:50We hope that you'll scribble our website on a cocktail napkin the next time someone compliments your
08:54beautiful coils and kinks. We're still just a handful of people in Austin, Texas bringing you information
09:01and inspiration but NaturallyCurly is doing more creative things and working with the biggest
09:05brands in the world. Curly hair isn't just a fad or a trend and we've proven that. I'm so excited
09:11about the next chapter and I know you'll all be a part of that.
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