// TECHCRUNCH — MONDO
Dawn Myers is making it easier to style, detangle, and care for curly hair
Normally, Dawn Myers wears her hair up in a big old afro, and anyone with an afro can attest that wash days — the routine of washing and styling textured hair — are often tedious. They take a lot of detangling, product, styling, and, well, time.
“I was watching ‘Shark Tank,’ and there was another curly girl idea,” she recalled of a day around eight years ago, when a pitch for a hair product aired. She started thinking about all the hair tools on the market, like blow dryers and curling irons, “things that straighten and change the chemistry of our naturally curly hair,” she told TechCrunch, adding that it takes around an hour and 20 minutes to wash and style her own hair.
None of those tools help with that, and for Myers, it highlighted a gap that has always existed in the beauty hardware space — a lack of tooling for textured hair. It’s a space that’s complex, expensive, and just overlooked.
“If you think back to slavery, we were mandated to cover our hair. That’s where do-rags come from. You had to cover your hair. Why? Because our hair was seen as ugly and unkempt and unacceptable,” she said. Later came hot combs, chemical relaxers, and flat irons, all of which straighten textured hair. “It’s only been the past 15 years or so where women of color and Black women in particular and, quite frankly, white women as well have really felt comfortable exposing their naturally curly hair and really just embracing it.”
Soon after that episode aired, she whipped out a legal pad and sketched out a business idea, then went to Ace Hardware and CVS and put together a “Frankenstein-looking prototype.”
Her idea eventually became the company Richualist, which is known for its product Mint, a hair tool that helps detangle, condition, gel, and style in a single stroke using refillable product pods. It even has warming technology to gently heat the product before it’s applied.
“We get that styling time down to about seven to 10 minutes,” she said. “It’s a massive game changer for the customer really stressed out by wash day.” She said her product, which also comes in travel size, helps make hair a bit healthier, reducing shedding and breakage by up to 70% since people no longer need to tug endlessly on their strands as they wash and style.
She built it with the materials science company Dow, after an early prototype caught the company’s attention during a startup accelerator program. “It just so happens that Dow had identified this white space recently as well, and they were starting a textured hair care unit,” she said. “So they ended up collaborating with us and giving us a lot of engineering help and manufacturing guidance.”
Even though she eventually became one of the first 100 Black women to raise more than $1 million in venture funding, the early days were rough. “It’s really impossible to get hardware funded,” she continued. “It’s even more impossible to get it funded when we’re talking about such a niche problem.”
She recalled the early meetings with executives in the beauty industry. “There are no people who look like me in those R&D suites.” In fact, she said, when she described wash days, “these people didn’t know what a wash day was. They didn’t understand that there’s this whole process that their customers have to go through.” She would tell them how painful and arduous the process is. “And the powers that be, up until this point, did not know,” she continued. “Even the bonds in our hair are totally different than other technology types. We really do need bespoke technology.”