| HAIR ON FIRE
inspired by personal tragedy and her family’s homemade beauty concoctions, nancy Twine went from trading commodities on Wall street to building a fast-growing luxury hair-care brand.
Inspired by personal tragedy and her family’s homemade beauty concoctions, Nancy Twine went from trading commodities on Wall Street to building a fast-growing luxury hair-care brand.
Acharcoal and coconut-oil shampoo that smells like mint cookies flows into dozens of 8-ounce tubs at a contract lab in suburban New Jersey. Surveying the tubs is 33-year-old Nancy Twine, who created the shampoo, a scalp-exfoliating formula that retails for nine times the cost of mass-market shampoos like Head & Shoulders. “This was a big one for us,” says Twine, founder of the hair-care company Briogeo.
In recent years, as more and more beauty products are manufactured at independent labs, dozens of women have launched their own brands, from makeup artists turned bloggers like Huda Kattan to celebrities like Kylie Jenner. But Twine says her seven years at Goldman Sachs have given her a leg up, prepping her to price ambitiously, source ingredients directly, combine orders to save money on production runs and build relationships with partners. On retail shelves for just four years, Briogeo has been profitable every year of its existence and brings in more than $10 million in annual revenue from sales at Sephora, Nordstrom, Forever 21’s Riley Rose and sample services like Birchbox and Ipsy. “From the start,” Twine says, “I wanted to make sure that our margins were good, so that not only could we reinvest back in the brand but so that down the line we never had to compromise.”
Twine, who identifies as African-American, is attempting to appeal to all women. Unlike many brands, Briogeo targets customers by hair texture (wavy, coily, dry, thin) rather than by ethnicity. “I remember going to CVS back in the day, and it was always very segregated,” she says. In addition, Briogeo formulates its naturally derived products without sulfates (linked to skin irritation), silicones (may dry and thin hair), phthalates (potentially toxic in high concentrations), parabens (banned in the European Union; binds to estrogen receptors), DEA (also a skin irritant) and artificial dyes. “People were literally telling me you can’t do this without silicones,” Twine says. “I had to do my own research and tell chemists what they needed to be blending in order to get it to work better.”
Even though so-called clean beauty is one of the fastest-growing segments of the beauty industry, there are few nontoxic hair lines in general and even fewer for textured hair. That gap has created a big opportunity. Black customers purchased almost $500 million worth of shampoo last year, according to the research firm Mintel, and are the fastestgrowing segment of the $13 billion U.S. hair-care market, according to Euromonitor. Most Briogeo products are priced slightly below other premium hair brands, a point of pride for Twine. The competitive price helped Twine convince retailers that