Natural Hair Enthusiasts Create Curl-Care Empire

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

Have you ever wondered what happens to people after they compete on a show like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Do those people, the winners at least, just wander off and fritter away their prize money on a new car or a vacation? Well, maybe some of them do, but not the person I'll tell you about today. The guy in today's story performs well on the show, walking away with $100,000 in winnings. But then, he's even smarter about what he does with the money, investing a portion of it into a side hustle that becomes a real business.

This business is largely led by his wife, so we'll talk a lot about her. It's a tag team effort, but he happens to be the initial investor from those winnings on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It's a really fun story. Our team enjoyed working on it quite a bit. We're calling it Natural Hair Enthusiasts Create Curl Care Empire.

Like I said, it's a fun one, so stay tuned. The whole story is coming right up. The year was 2013. Beyonce performed at the Super Bowl, people were doing the Harlem Shake, and high school sweethearts Kim and Tim Lewis of Chicago, Illinois were looking for a change. Kim was working her way up the ladder in corporate America, while Tim found himself in between jobs.

The job hunt struggle was real, but there was one benefit to this time of uncertainty. It got them thinking about how amazing it would be for them to work for themselves, doing something that would finally allow them to live life on their own terms. But first, they needed an idea. Around this time, Kim had thrown herself into learning about the beauty space, especially the space that featured people of color. With a growing love of her all-natural hair, she eagerly sought out resources to keep her look on fleek.

But unlike the gorgeous hair on her head, her research fell flat. There just wasn't anything out there to educate and empower other women of color to embrace their goddess-given curls. From then on, her mission was clear. She'd comb through the tangled-up rhetoric to supply her people with the information they needed to ditch their flat irons and hair-damaging chemicals. And she'd build up a social media community in order to do it.

But with Tim in between jobs, money was tighter than her curls. Where were they going to get the capital to fund something like this? That's when they decided on something a bit unconventional. You see, Tim is a trivia whiz, and exactly the kind of person that you want on your team for those weekly quiz nights at the bar. And what does any trivia-loving person do when they're looking to fund a new business venture?

Well, they go on who wants to be a millionaire. Or at least that's what Tim did. Although it felt like a stretch when he signed up, he was chosen to compete, and their families took a road trip to New York City to share in the hair-brain scheme. When everything was said and done, Tim walked away with a fun anecdote, a story he'd remember for the rest of his life, and $100,000 in prize winnings. Using about a quarter of that prize money, Natural Hair Academy began to take shape.

For about a year, the couple ran the platform. Kim would interview curly hair experts and share their knowledge with her audience. There was just one problem. The couple was losing more money than they were making. As Kim says now, the best entrepreneurs have a short memory.

If it's not working, do something different. So instead of forcing it to be something that it wasn't, Kim and Tim decided to cut their losses, not unlike a bad perm. Although she felt the execution could use some work, Kim still believed that helping other women of color embrace their natural locks was her calling. So six months later, she answered that call again. Still attempting to find more natural products for her hair, Kim found herself brushing up on DIY hair solutions.

She spent hours watching recipe videos and picked out a few she wanted to try. After a mad dash to the grocery store for ingredients, she tore apart her kitchen in the pursuit of fierce and natural hair. About four hours and a couple hundred dollars later, she was disappointed with the final result. Kim believed there had to be a better and less expensive way to try out these natural hair care recipes. In this day and age, the only way to truly know exactly what is in your products is to make it yourself.

And that was the whole idea behind building her subscription-based model. Her customers would use her raw ingredients and recipe tutorials to make the products themselves so they would know exactly what they were putting on their hair and body. And it also wouldn't break the bank. She set out to learn more about best practices for creating natural products. Whenever she found something promising, she tested it out, keeping the things that worked and ditching those that didn't.

She looked at the products she loved and tried to figure out a way to alter the recipes so that they included no more than five ingredients, which is important for beginner DIYers. Slowly but surely, she started creating a line of go-to products like watermelon kiwi hair gel, whipped mango and blackcurrant hair and body butter. The kits included containers to store the mixtures, as well as a link to her website for instructions, a video demonstration, and some tips on how to customize the recipes. Within a couple weeks, Kim and Tim launched a website using WordPress, and they called their new harried scheme "Chromix." They then flooded friends, family, and followers on social media and began to take pre-orders at a subscription rate of $25 a month. Or at least, they tried to begin taking orders, because in the end, they just had one order.

And it was from Kim's cousin, no less. Kim was ready to throw in the hair towel, but Tim, not wanting to see her give up on something she was so passionate about, said, "No, maybe you just launched wrong. If Airbnb can relaunch seven times, surely Chromix can relaunch twice." This was an eye-opening moment for Kim, who realized that even majorly successful companies make mistakes, especially when they're launching, and sometimes it takes a bad launch to figure out how to launch properly to your target audience. For the second attempt, she started with a list of journalists and influencers who might be able to help her brush up some interest for her launch. And this was also critical, instead of creating a general launch that would go on forever, they created a sense of urgency by limiting that launch to a single day.

And they also had 100 box orders that first day, much better than their first attempt with one order. Since then, the couple has continued to grow their hustle with hundreds of subscriptions and thousands of orders shipped. Now, almost four years later, they've moved on from sending customers ingredients to actually selling their own product line. After selling the DIY boxes for a couple years and bringing in up to $17,000 a month on their own without any kind of ad spending, Kim and Tim noticed that some of their best customers were unsubscribing. When they reached out to them to see if there was something they could do to improve, the customers said that the subscription was fine, but their boxes were piling up.

They just weren't able to get to them. It seemed that DIY subscription boxes were great when you didn't know what you wanted. But once you did, you would rather just buy the product from someone else instead of having to make it yourself over and over again. This insight was helpful. In fact, they noticed that there was one box that customers were purchasing over and over again.

It was their Flaxseed Gelbox. They realized it could be their flagship item, so they started offering it as a product that stood on its own. Last year, Kurlmex made a total of $1 million, and already Kurlmex has surpassed that amount in 2019, making $3 million. It's actually Kim's goal to close out the year at $10 million. It's clear that Kim and Tim have built a curly hair care empire, one that grew from a hustle to their full-time business, and now they get to live that independent life they always dreamed of.

Not only that, but Kurlmex has allowed them to give back to their community by opening up a manufacturing facility in Chicago and employing women to ensure that they have a job where they receive fair wages. And they can't wait to see what the future of Kurlmex brings. Well, it might have been a hair-brain scheme at one point, but it seems like it has really turned out quite well for both Tim and Kim. Beginning with that $100,000 in seed money, I think they actually only spent $25,000 of it. But the whole point is the origin story of the who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire combined with the desire to work in this market, desire to provide better solutions for women of color who are seeking natural hair care products, but then also recognizing that your first idea might not be your best idea.

And I love the quote from Kim about how the best entrepreneurs have a short memory. If it's not working, do something different. You could even say, "Cut your losses." All right, now we've got a couple of tips as well because Kim was super helpful to us, giving us tons of information for this story. I really appreciate that. So in her relaunch strategy of going out and getting 100 box subscriptions in a single day compared to the first launch that had one subscription, she spent a lot of time reaching out to journalists.

And here is her four-part strategy or four tips that she has for you if you'd like to do something similar. And by that, I don't mean necessarily selling natural hair care products, but you've got a message, you've got a product, you've got something that you want to get out to the right people. So what do you do? So you make this list of potential journalists and publications, then you read up on their articles so that you know a little bit about their work and can use personalized touches in your initial email. She says email templates are great, but custom pitches that are personalized to each journalist help you stand out.

So start with a base pitch and then include a highly customized intro for each email. Number three, send your pitch first thing in the morning, include a catchy title and then put the benefit for them right at the top of the email. They get a lot of these kinds of pitches, so do everything you can to make it easy for them to say yes. And then last, if they've written about something similar before, they'll likely be open to writing about it again. But also make sure that enough time has passed since the last similar article was written.

They need to keep their content fresh as well. I love those tips. Thank you again for that, Kim. And listeners, I hope you enjoyed this story. I enjoyed working on it quite a bit, as you may notice, not just myself, but also the Side Hustle School team as well.

So from all of us to you, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. We're almost at episode 900. To find the show notes for today, just go to sidehustleschool.com/899, 899. Do come back tomorrow. Do be sure you're subscribed.

Do tell your friends. It is all completely free. And I'm so grateful that you're listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.

From the Onward Project.