Miss Jessie's

by Miko Branch

  COVERT OPERATION

  Many people were clamoring for our product. We ramped up production, moving it from the kitchen table of Titi’s fourth-floor apartment in our brownstone, where we were whipping up batches in the KitchenAids, to our garden first floor. Meanwhile, I’d decided to invest in those four industrial-sized Hobart mixers—the kind pizzerias and bakeries use—so that we could mix much larger quantities to meet the increasing volumes of orders. That move increased our output sixfold.

  It had become clear that the work was backbreaking for Titi and me. We hired a lovely man we’d met at a hardware store on Atlantic Avenue. He had a work ethic like nothing we’d seen outside of ourselves. I have an instinct for people and was impressed with how this gentleman went out of his way to help load a heavy hand truck into the trunk of our car.

  The extra pair of strong hands freed Titi to focus on all the other new challenges of the business, such as shipping, packaging, and not least, sourcing ingredients for our product. Getting all these ingredients shipped to our brownstone was a delicate business. At that point, our typical order might be a thousand boxes of a particular ingredient; obviously, we weren’t going to find these quantities in a beauty supply store. Instead, Titi found a way to contact a product’s manufacturer by looking up its name on the label. The manufacturer would in turn hook her up with the distributor. She’d make a direct deal with the distributor, getting us deep discounts warranted by the large quantities we were ordering.

  “What are you guys doing with all this stuff?” a distributor asked Titi one day.

  It might have been an innocent question. But the beauty and hair industry was small, and we did not want to make too much noise about what we were doing. We feared that they would get ideas and take our market share. Being set up in business already, they’d have a head start.

  Hiring Tips

  1. Small businesses can be overwhelmed easily when business grows, so make sure you have enough hands on deck.

  2. When bringing new people into an organization, check their actions and attitudes to ensure that they’re the right fit.

  3. Ask yourself: Are they quick to step up and help before being asked? Are they polite and respectful? Is there an obvious enthusiasm?

  4. Of course, check their references and consider their skill sets and experience, but remember, it’s the intangibles that matter most. Individual character and integrity should be the most important items on your checklist when you’re considering which employees to bring on board.

  “Oh, people just really like it,” Titi replied, keeping it vague. She’d usually feign some excuse to put them off or duck the question. In the end, they were not overly invested, because they were being paid immediately. The demand became huge, and it was clear we could not continue making this stuff in our basement. It got us thinking about finding a chemist to help us reverse-engineer the formula. That way, we could start getting it made by a contract manufacturer, like normal companies do.

  Our decision to come up with our own proprietary formula was a brilliant move. Rather than giving the formula to a contract manufacturer, hiring a chemist would ensure that Miss Jessie’s officially owned the rights to the recipe.

  Since we were children, our father had drummed into us the importance of owning your stuff. He exposed us to artists like Ray Charles, who owned the rights to his music, and Madam C. J. Walker, who had patented her own hair formulas. He also told us many cautionary tales about talented people who lost everything because they had failed to establish ownership.

  Ownership is key. Why do all that work only to risk losing everything to imitators with bigger resources?

  By the time Titi and I were running our own business, the value of ownership was ingrained in us. The nineties were a time when many black entrepreneurs were first to market products and stake their claims: Carl Jones with Cross Colours, Puffy with Bad Boy record company, and Hype Williams with Beautiful Music Video, to name a few. We wanted to do the same in our untapped niche market.

  Most upstart beauty companies never think to protect their intellectual property. But patents ultimately meant that we could never be held hostage by the maker, and we could take our business to another contract manufacturer if we were not happy with quality control or production costs. My paranoia about people stealing our ideas ran deep, which was why I insisted upon owning trademarks on all aspects of our business. I understood that what we had was valuable. Unique. Knowing this, Titi was smart enough to fill out the trademark paperwork every time we came out with a new product. This was long before any lawyer got involved, adding considerably to the value of our business.

  Finding the right chemist was a challenge. We didn’t even know where to begin. Consumer manufacturing wasn’t our world, and we didn’t have any contacts to speak of. It’s not as if our competitors were about to share their production secrets. But we were determined. We ended up taking a two-hour drive to the home offices for an ingredient we used. We cased the place, going so far as to sift through their garbage to see if there was any kind of paperwork to reveal who they worked with to make the ingredient. There was nothing more than a big warehouse, but the size of the operation told us something.

  “Miko, this could really be a huge business!” Titi realized when we came back from our snooping trip. “I mean, more than we ever imagined.”

  “What makes you think so?” I asked her.

  “Because they’re not even making the stuff at that location. It’s just a facility for storing and distributing. Just imagine how much product they are shipping and how many people are buying the stuff.”

  Women in this country spend over $400 billion a year on beauty products, and the black hair and cosmetic industry sees sales of about $9 billion a year, according to the Black Owned Beauty Supply Association. Maybe, just maybe, we could get a piece of this.

  My sister and I racked our brains, trying to think of someone who might be able to help us. Prior to the formulation of Curly Pudding, we had traveled to Chicago, where a lot of manufacturing for African-American hair-care products took place.

  It was a disappointing trip. Although we’d been fortunate enough to make contact with one of the owners, who agreed to meet with us, he was blunt about what he could do for us within our tight budget. From what we saw and tested among the samples on the factory’s shelves, nothing it was already producing came close to what we had in mind. The manufacturer claimed he could produce a prototype of the kind of crème-based curly-hair product we were aiming for, but all he ever sent us was another variation on conditioner.

  The fact that we found no one who could make anything to our desired standards was a godsend. It inspired us to put together our own formulation—exactly what Miss Jessie would have done under the circumstances. “If they don’t have what you want, make it yourself,” she always told us.

  After searching for and finally getting a referral from a fragrance manufacturer, we made contact with someone who could help us. We spent the next year with this chemist, reverse-engineering our ingredients to create a recipe that could be mass-produced. We went through a lot of trial and error to get our rudimentary formula exactly right.

  PRODUCT EXTENSIONS

  It wasn’t just the formula for Curly Pudding that we had to figure out. By 2006, we had four products for curly hair: Curly Pudding, Curly Meringue, Curly Buttercreme, and Baby Buttercreme. I insisted we come up with Curly Meringue about three months after Curly Pudding, to give our customers more choice. Using our first product on every single type of curl was not the way to go. Not everything was for everyone. This formulation was a cousin to Curly Pudding, designed for a less tight curl.

  Our styling products balanced hold factor while counteracting frizz by adding moisture. They were subtle differences, but the changes we made were intuitive, as a result of working with a variety of curl types in the salon. Because black women’s hair is typically a lot drier, the more hold you have, the crunchier the hair will feel. We counterbalanc
ed this with conditioning. Looser curl types, on the other hand, can take more hold without the curl looking too dry and crispy, and that was good for customers who wanted their styling to last a little longer. We also made Curly Meringue look and smell different, in a creamy yellow color with a piña colada fragrance that smelled good enough to eat.

  A few months after that, we diversified with moisturizers—the Buttercremes—which could be used on their own or in combination with other styling products. People usually bought both. Curly Buttercreme was an immediate hit. We spiked this super-softening soufflé with cooling peppermint essence. Our customers loved it for growing out natural hair and preventing peppercorn-tangled knotted ends. It tamed hairline edges, moisturized pony puffs, and allowed for ease of at-home styling using two-strand twists, coils, braids, and cornrows. Clients with especially tight, curly, or kinky hair, as well as Transitioners—women who were growing out their processed hair—used it daily, quickly making it one of our best sellers. Although many women loved the tingling scalp sensation, I felt we needed a gentler option, so we came up with a lighter, less strongly scented version, Baby Buttercreme, which was also more child-friendly—although over half of the customers are adults, who use it for natural styling and daily moisturizing.

  SPREADING THE WORD

  As we diversified, we became more sophisticated about how we promoted ourselves. Realizing that the target market—women who had embraced their natural hair—did not typically go to salons, we decided from the beginning not to do what most hair product companies do: sell through salons. Instead, our conversation with our customer was direct, through our website. By 2005, we could afford to invest a little more in solidifying our reputation as market leaders for curly hair. We hired a publicist we found randomly online who had just opened her business. She got us into every major fashion and lifestyle magazine: Glamour, WWD, O, Elle, Marie Claire, Allure, Ebony, Essence, New York, OK, and Nylon.

  We were adamant that we wouldn’t target only magazines for women of color. This had to be a broad-based marketing campaign. As a result, Miss Jessie’s was quick to resonate with all women who had curly-hair needs, just as white girls were our first salon customers when we got that ink in Time Out. Somehow, the mainstream acceptance helped us to win over some of the diehards in the natural-hair movement.

  Self-promotion is not only a good thing, it is required. It helps customers identify with the people behind the brand and saves a fortune on advertising costs.

  Alongside the media coverage, we were also getting recognition from top celebrity stylists. One of our earliest champions was Anthony Dickey. He was the gentleman at Louis Licari’s salon who recommended our products, helping us to generate our first big wave of orders. They ordered our products for years and helped us to sustain our business.

  RETAIL BREAKTHROUGH

  The retail chain Ricky’s had just started to carry us—our first major retail distributor, with twenty-five stores. We approached the chain about carrying our products because, although they had a good selection of salon-level hair care, there was a glaring omission in their product range. Titi and I went to the SoHo Broadway store near Houston Street with my five-year-old in tow. At the time there were only about two curly brands in Ricky’s, and those brands catered to a looser curl, so I thought they needed our product on their shelves. While my son played on the dirty trafficked floor with his trucks, Titi and I bum-rushed the stock guy and demanded to know why they didn’t carry Miss Jessie’s.

  “Okay, no doubt, I’ll try to hook you up,” he told us, accepting our product samples to give to the store manager for the weekly Tuesday meeting at Ricky’s headquarters.

  A week later, we got the call that we were in. It was the start of a brand-new curly category in New York City. Ricky’s quickly demanded as much product as we could produce.Demand was high. They couldn’t keep us in stock, and trying to fulfill the orders was making us batty. This was true for all the smaller brick-and-mortar stores carrying our products.

  We ran out of room in our basement for all the barrels of ingredients, which we had to keep in a storage locker on Hall Street in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Titi used to drive up there with our new minivan stuffed to the gills. We were all busy worker bees, loading and unloading deliveries and shipments with our production guy and a few of the girls who helped out in our salon. My sister and I had never been so fit in our lives!

  In addition to our Herculean efforts to get our product out to stores, we also worked hard to maintain control of presentation. Whenever we negotiated with beauty suppliers to carry our products, they had to send us photos of the inside and outside of their store. For us, it was important that we were not seen in a dingy location with poor merchandising and shelf placement. A lousy location could hurt the brand. As a result, we were highly selective about which stores we would allow to stock our jars and tubes of styling cream, gels, and conditioners.

  PRESSURE COOKER

  After the Ricky’s deal, it became apparent that our product line could really take off. We were consumed with anxiety that we could suddenly get the call from a thousand stores and our lack of capacity would cause us to miss a huge opportunity. We were also paranoid that people would find out that we were making our products in our house. Doing all this street-style, putting the product together and hoping for the best, was keeping us up at night with what Miss Jessie called “worriation.”

  Business was booming, but all of the pressure was taking its toll. My sister and I found ourselves out of sync. The signs were showing of two people who worked way too closely together. By necessity, we’d been up under each other for a few years—ever since we’d moved to Bed-Stuy from downtown Brooklyn—and it wasn’t healthy for our relationship. We were living, breathing, and sleeping Miss Jessie’s. There was no room in our lives for anything else, and, due to the situation we’d faced in our last salon downtown, we barely left the house. My anger and resentment over that incident lingered for two years while I worked to get us to a profitable place. Driven as I was to get us past this rough patch, there was little respite outside of work. Rebuilding a business from zero left no room for having fun and socializing. We were toiling morning, noon, and night. It had to be that way to push past the frightening period of having had nothing, six years earlier.

  Everything happened so fast for me. I went from being the talent to being the businessperson in one swipe, without any warning or preparation. Meanwhile, my sister and I had never really dealt with the emotional aftermath of that earlier disappointment.

  For two solid years after fleeing to Bed-Stuy, I was not pleased with Titi. I was a single parent feeling frustrated that we had lost our business downtown. It was mandatory for me to get back to work in our home salon to pay that month’s mortgage. It was also an afterthought that ten days prior I’d delivered my son through a cesarian section surgery, and was walking around with staples holding my stomach together. I went into repair mode and neglected to fully resolve the issues. As a consequence, Titi got the full brunt of my fury.

  Communicate, communicate, communicate. False expectations and frustrations can occur when you don’t make intentions clear.

  The tension between us continued until we hired some help in 2002. By 2005, we were able to hire more employees. I was relieved that we had built our business back up and had gotten to a point where my sister’s role could be heavily reduced, with employees to carry that load.

  In June 2006, we moved the entire production business to a warehouse at 43 Hall Street, not far from where we had the storage unit. For forty-five hundred dollars a month, we got five thousand square feet—all the storage space we needed—and a loading dock, which simplified the logistics of our business. No more rolling individual heavy barrels down those narrow three cement steps on our garden floor. Now the UPS truck could back up onto it, and we could take all our deliveries without the prying eyes of our neighbors or the heavy pressure on our backs. A few months later, our formulas were ready, and we were ab
le to move our production to a contract manufacturer. Our business was finally coming up from underground. We were no longer a basement operation.

  It would have been a huge relief except for one thing: As soon as we moved our production business out of the brownstone, Titi decided to run the Miss Jessie’s product company by herself, cutting me out completely.

  They say you should never mix business with family. I disagree, because together Titi and I had created something wonderful, and that kind of achievement could have happened only through the passion, devotion, and love we shared as siblings. They also say blood is thicker than water. The problem is, blood is also messier.

  Over the years, as we poured all of our energy and time into building the business, we’d drifted apart. Resentments on both sides ran deep. Other than matters of work, we barely communicated. I was faced with a sobering reality: I was sued and iced out of Miss Jessie’s by Titi for the next two years.

  There had been rumblings. Miss Jessie’s was in the process of reformatting operating agreements and organizing them into LLCs, and that was raising some questions about who had contributed what to the business. But this whole time, I had left the operational side of the business, including paperwork and contracts, to Titi. Immersed in rebuilding our new salon and product business with a focus on curly hair, I hadn’t been paying attention to the details. When I asked to see our company’s bank records, Titi responded by withdrawing her half of the money.