From there I was like, let's go and find these products for my hair type, and when I got to the "multicultural hair-care aisle," I was really shocked. It felt like I had gone into a time machine back to 1995 — nothing had changed. I couldn't find anything that I related to, and all of the offerings were really complicated and overwhelming. I pretty much just wanted to know how to wash my hair, and nobody was taking me through that process or making it easy.
From that moment, I went away and started building Bread. I wanted to create the staples of a hair-care wardrobe (which is how I landed on the "Bread"), and then I extended the brand name to Bread Beauty Supply. It's a nostalgic nod to that beauty supply shopping experience and a signal to what we want to eventually build.
I knew from the beginning that I wanted the brand to exist in retail — specifically in Sephora. I felt like I wasn't getting what I wanted in there — not just in Sephora but more broadly in these mainstream spaces. This customer, which was me, was being relegated to independent stores. The woman that we were speaking to was already shopping in Sephora for skin care and makeup, but we knew that she wasn't really shopping there for hair care yet. So I thought, "How can we indicate that it's for her?" I decided pretty quickly that we had to have faces on the products so say "this is for you," so that if she were walking through the store, it would catch her eye.
