Tag: TextureMedia

NaturallyCurly CoFounder Michelle Breyer Created a Curl Empire in Austin

April 1, 2017 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Publisher and Reporter with Silicon Hills
Host of Ideas to Invoices

As a business reporter at the Austin American-Statesman, Michelle Breyer launched a website geared to girls with curls.

At a party with friends and colleagues, Breyer complained about the lack of hairstyles and products for women with curly hair. At the suggestion of a colleague to start her own website, she decided right then and there to get on a computer to search for information about products and services for women with texture in their hair. She couldn’t find much. That led her to launch NaturallyCurly in Austin with Gretchen Heber, a colleague at the paper in 1998.

“There was such a void of information for people with curly hair,” Breyer said. But people with texture in their hair make up 40 percent of the overall population, she said. They were being largely ignored by the hair care marketplace.

NaturallyCurly started as a hobby and a passion project.

But they listened to their community and they added products and services and content tailored directly to that community from audience feedback.

They never thought it would evolve into a big business. Initially they sold t-shirts to support the business. They created their first real business plan when they went out to raise money.

“If we had created a business plan too early, we may have limited ourselves,” Breyer said.

NaturallyCurly created the first eCommerce site targeted at women with curly hair, called CurlMart. They filled packages out of Gretchen’s house. They financed the site out of their own bank accounts.

They also had amazing mentors like Jimmy Treybig, founder of Tandem Computers, who served as the company’s early adviser.

In 2005, NaturallyCurly was making $250,000 a year. Breyer was working 40 hours a week on NaturallyCurly and she was working full time. She quit her newspaper job and plunged full time into entrepreneurship.

But it didn’t go exactly as planned.

The week after she left the newspaper, they lost their biggest advertiser and she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. But in even those bleakest moments, she didn’t give up. A week later, NaturallyCurly landed Paul Mitchell as an advertiser, led by Austin Billionaire John Paul DeJoria.

“Things just worked out because they had to work out,” Breyer said. “You can make things happen if you have to make things happen.”

NaturallyCurly raised $600,000 in seed stage funding and was the first investment from angels in the Central Texas Angel Network. They used the funds to bring on Crista Bailey as the company’s head of marketing. She eventually became Chief Executive Officer. They also used the money to hire a developer and a public relations firm.

“I know what I know and I know what I don’t know,” Breyer said. “I wanted to have people who really were much more knowledgeable in certain areas. As an entrepreneur, you’ve got to be constantly re-engineering yourself and finding your value. Your value is not just that you started the company. At some point, it’s got to be where do you fit in. You’ve got to be best at what you do even more so as the company grows.”

NaturallyCurly ended up raising another $250,000 a couple years later when it launched its stylist site geared to stylist reviews. That venture also allowed it to forge a partnership with Modern Salon.

At first, people didn’t take NaturallyCurly seriously. But then they started getting invited to special shows and industry events. They became the leader in the texture hair industry and they still are, Breyer said.

Content and community are everything for NaturallyCurly, Breyer said.

“You can never lose sight of that community,” she said. “They are the core.”
Walmart does a campaign on NaturallyCurly because they know that community is engaged, Breyer said.

NaturallyCurly raised its third round, $1.2 million, that allowed them to develop a mobile app and those funds took them to a level where it became an acquisition target.

In September of 2015, Ultra/Standard, a multicultural hair care and beauty distribution company based in New York, acquired TextureMedia.

Today, TextureMedia has 40 employees and 100 contributors. It reaches about 26 million a month through all its websites and social media channels, Breyer said. It expects to grow 15 percent this year, she said. Its brands include NaturallyCurly, CurlyNikki, CurlMart and CurlStylists. It also launched TextureTrends in 2010 to provide hair care brands with consumer insights on hair care and style trends and behaviors.

“We created this market and now we have a lot of competitors,” Breyer said.
Startups as they grow must retain their entrepreneurial spirit, their flexibility and nimbleness and their entrepreneurial sense of urgency, Breyer said.

“You cannot be complacent,” Breyer said. “You have to constantly be re-innovating and bringing people in to help you.”

Editor’s note: Michelle Breyer was the first entrepreneur interviewed to kick off Silicon Hills News’ Ideas to Invoices Podcast. She provides a lot more insights into how she built NaturallyCurly in the podcast. Please listen to the interview or go to iTunes to subscribe to our weekly podcast. Please also rate and review the podcast on iTunes. We will soon be launching on Soundcloud, Stitcher and other podcasting platforms.

TextureMedia Gets Acquired by New York-based Ultra/Standard

September 22, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

TextureMedia, a hair care media company in Austin, got acquired Monday by Ultra/Standard, a multicultural hair care and beauty distribution company based in New York.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TextureMedia, formerly known as NaturallyCurly.com, has raised about $2 million since its founding in 1998. It was one of the first investments made by the Central Texas Angel Network in 2007. Jimmy Treybig, founder of Tandem Computers and Billionaire John Paul DeJoria, cofounder of John Paul Mitchell, are both investors. Michelle Breyer and Gretchen Heber, former employees with the Austin American Statesman, founded the company to create a community of people with natural curly hair to share beauty tips and products online.

Texture Media now has 20 employees, with 19 of them in Austin, said Crista Bailey, its CEO. Those employees and the company will remain in Austin and will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Ultra/Standard. Breyer is now head of business development for TextureMedia.

TextureMedia reaches 3 million people every month across its four portfolio brands. NaturallyCurly, CurlyNikki, CurlMart and CurlStylists. It also reaches a total of 26 million people every month through those brands’ social media channels, Bailey said. The company also launched TextureTrends in 2010 to provide hair care brands with consumer insights on hair care and style trends and behaviors.

“All of our growth has been organic,” Bailey said.

Ultra/Standard is a leading distributor of textured-hair products to major retailers such as Bed Bath & Beyond, Rite Aid, Sally Beauty Supply, Target, Walgreens and more. It also exports to countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

The acquisition of TextureMedia allows Ultra/Standard to closely track trends in the ethnic hair industry and to foster a conversation between retailers, brands and consumers, said Michael Ross, president of Ultra/Standard.

TextureMedia courtesy photo

Both Ultra/Standard and TextureMedia are pioneers in the textured hair care industry, Bailey said. Together they will be even stronger and will provide greater service to the 70 million adult women with textured hair, she said.

“This category for us has grown dramatically,” said Ross. “Retailers are super excited about it.”

And TextureMedia will give Ultra/Standard insights in the marketplace that will help it better advise retailers on which products to carry, Ross said.

The acquisition of TextureMedia connects Ultra/Standard to the community of consumers using textured hair products and provides a connection to the social and digital age for interacting with them, Ross said.

In the future, Ultra/Standard will also be able to tie retail events to TextureMedia’s websites, Ross said.

“It’s a win for everyone especially for the consumer,” Ross said.

Female Entrepreneurs Connect and Learn at Women@Austin

October 12, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

“Leave Your Superwomen Capes at the Door”

That’s Jan Ryan’s only rule for Women@Austin events at Capital Factory. The meetings provide a receptive environment for female entrepreneurs to connect and learn from each other while enjoying wine and hors d’oeuvres.

“Authenticity is what makes the magic for women,” Ryan said. “And being able to talk to each other with our guards down is when we learn.”

And since the group launched last February, Women@Austin has become extremely popular. The events have filled up within days of being announced and always have a waitlist.

For Austin Startup Week, the event filled up within five days with 140 women and a few men registered and a waitlist of 78 people, Ryan said.

The group also focuses on educating women-led startups about finding funding. Babson College recently released a study showing that women entrepreneurs have made considerable progress since 1999 in getting venture capital, but a wide gender gap still exists.

The study found “the amount of early-stage investment in companies with a woman on the executive team has tripled to 15 percent from 5 percent in the last 15 years.” Yet despite that progress, “85 percent of all venture capital-funded businesses have no women on the executive team.” And just 2.7 percent of venture capital funded companies had a woman CEO.

The event also featured a special “Elevate” award given to Jimmy Treybig, founder of Tandem Computers and a venture capitalist in Austin since 1996. He’s been a big supporter of many female-founded companies in Austin and serves on many boards, Ryan said.

In a brief talk, Treybig advised entrepreneurs looking to raise money to study the VC firms and angels before approaching them. Entrepreneurs need to find out if the VC firm invest in their field, how much they invest, whether they invest in new entrepreneurs with little experience and whether they invest in Austin and does the VC have money, Treybig said.

Seventeen VCs turned down Treybig when he started Tandem.

Women entrepreneurs also need to research whether the VC firm has female partners, Treybig said.

“Or do they have a man that has worked with women all of their life, like me, and realize how special, how smart, how motivated and how much contribution women can make and that’s never a question,” Treybig said. “If there isn’t either a women or that type of man, then I wouldn’t spend time…or I would put it way down the list.”

“The main point is there are two types of VCs,” Treybig said. “One type is VCs that have run companies. Others are financial VCs. They might not have worked with a lot of women.”

For Naturally Curly, now known as TextureMedia, Treybig found Golden Seeds of New York to invest in the women-run company. Now Mike Maples Jr.’s VC Firm Floodgate Ventures, which invests in Austin startups, has a woman as a partner, Treybig said.

Lastly, women entrepreneurs must be able to show investors how they will get their money back and make a profit on the investment, Treybig said.

Ingrid Vanderveldt, former Entrepreneur in Residence at Dell, also spoke briefly about Belle Capital Austin, a venture fund she’s heading up locally that invests in women-run tech companies.

The event concluded with a 30-minute panel discussion on lessons learned from women run firms. The panelists included Jeanette Hill, founder of Spot on Sciences, founded in 2010, Crista Bailey, CEO of TextureMedia, founded in 1998, and Zeynep Young, founder of Double Line Partners, founded in 2009.

Ryan asked the panelists to talk about some of their failures and lessons learned from their ventures.

Hill advised new entrepreneurs to make sure that they have a good product and market fit. The product doesn’t sell itself, she said. It’s important to know how to market and sell it.

Bailey told new entrepreneurs to raise as much as money as they can to give their idea some gas.

Young advised new entrepreneurs not to give big titles to early employees. Reserve those titles for when the company grows and becomes successful so that those titles will be there to hire on the talent to grow the company, she said.