Bruin grows business of handmade hair care products

When the average hair care product wasn’t able to provide the desired shine and texture in her hair, Marika Straughter made the decision three years ago to take matters into her own hands.

After watching several YouTube videos and cross-checking the different ingredients in previous hair care products she’s used in the past, the urban education graduate student began to get her hands dirty.

“I started playing around with natural ingredients that people were telling me about, like coconut oil, olive oil and shea butter,” Straughter said. “I used them on myself and people started to notice the growth of my hair, the health of my hair and the difference of my hair.”

Straughter began giving away the product to friends and family after receiving those compliments. But after two years of making the product just for her inner circle, she decided to make the most of her efforts by starting the company EbonyCoilyGal, which operates through an online store to sell her beauty products.

“I found out I was giving away so much product and I really felt like it was a really good investment,” Straughter said. “They’re genuinely good products and I didn’t feel like it was worth giving away for free anymore; I knew that it would be something people would be willing to buy.”

With her commitments to her classes at UCLA and a job as a kindergarten teacher at Esperanza Elementary School, Straughter only has time to hand-make her products over the weekends.

But Straughter said she has plans to devote more time to her business once she’s received her master’s degree by attending conferences and conventions, marketing on different campuses and finding new distributors.

Currently, Straughter said she mainly sees sales coming in from the South Central Los Angeles and the Leimert Park area, but also markets the product through word of mouth.

One of those consumers is Seyi Famuyiwa, an American University graduate student who met Straughter as an undergraduate at UC Riverside. Famuyiwa said she prefers using EbonyCoilyGal over store-brand hair products.

“The things you buy in the store usually have a lot of harmful chemicals, especially to African-American hair,” Famuyiwa said. “And (EbonyCoilyGal products) smell good, nobody wants to put something in their hair that smells nasty.”

Straughter has also engaged the services of Launch Consultants to help expand her business. Thus far, the company has helped her with her website, packing and labeling her products, but the consulting firm also has plans to expand EbonyCoilyGal’s marketing by starting a referral program and finding distributors.

“The reason why the distributors are so important is that it’s very hard to find her exact target market … There’s only about 12 percent of people who are considered African-American within the United States,” said Leland Baptist, CEO of Launch Consulting. “Engaging in the promotion with distributors and shops allows her to target on the actual demographic.”

Straughter said EbonyCoilyGal typically makes about two to three sales each week, with the top selling product being EbonyCoilyGal’s Homemade Shea Butter Hair Creme. However, there are certain periods where the company receives an upward spike in sales, such as the recent December’s holiday week, in which EbonyCoilyGal made 40 sales.

But even when Straughter has to fulfill a larger volume of orders, she still retains the hands-on approach that began her business, making sure she maintains an attention to detail.

“It takes me about an hour (to make one product) just because I want to be precise,” Straughter said. “I’m sure it wouldn’t take nearly as long as I draw it out to be, but I’m really particular about how I want things.”