Page 92 - Forbes - Asia (September 2018)

Entrepreneurs

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.

BY CHLOE SORVINO

A you can’t do this without silicones,” Twine says. “I had to do my own
charcoal and coconut-oil shampoo that smells like
research and tell chemists what they needed to be blending in order
mint cookies ows into dozens of 8-ounce tubs at a con-
tract lab in suburban New Jersey. Surveying the tubs is
to get it to work better.”
33-year-old Nancy Twine, who created the shampoo, a
Even though so-called clean beauty is one of the fastest-growing
scalp-exfoliating formula that retails for nine times the cost of mass- segments of the beauty industry, there are few nontoxic hair lines in
market shampoos like Head & Shoulders. “his was a big one for general and even fewer for textured hair. hat gap has created a big
us,” says Twine, founder of the hair-care
company Briogeo.
In recent years, as more and more beau-
ty products are manufactured at indepen-
dent labs, dozens of women have launched
their own brands, from makeup artists
turned bloggers like Huda Kattan to celeb-
rities like Kylie Jenner. But Twine says her
seven years at Goldman Sachs have given
her a leg up, prepping her to price ambi-
tiously, 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 proitable every year of its existence
and brings in more than $10 million in an-
nual revenue from sales at Sephora, Nord-
strom, 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 identiies as African-Amer-
ican, is attempting to appeal to all women.
Unlike many brands, Briogeo targets cus-
tomers by hair texture (wavy, coily, dry,
thin) rather than by ethnicity. “I remem-
ber going to CVS back in the day, and it was
always very segregated,” she says. In addi-
tion, Briogeo formulates its naturally de-
rived 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 recep-
tors), DEA (also a skin irritant) and artii-
cial dyes. “People were literally telling me

90 | FORBES ASIA SEPTEMBER 2018