Getting The Perfect Hair With Taryn Gill

For a lot of us, our hair is our identity, and we’ve formed a strong bond with the curls on our head. Unfortunately, the world hasn’t always loved the locks on our heads, resulting in fewer and fewer products for us to choose from, especially if you’re a woman of colour with a hair type that requires specific products. Thankfully, more and more people are acknowledging the need for haircare products that cater to the specific African hair type, providing us with the perfect products for a great hair day.

Have A Great Hair Day with Taryn Gill

In a series called The Business of Health, hosted on the Nielsen Network, Longevity Live spoke to Taryn Gill, the founder of The Perfect Hair, an African haircare brand.

After noticing a gap in the African Market, Taryn identified  promptly launched a highly successful African hair care product into this space. It wasn’t long before The Perfect Hair garnered a reputation and the brand has now partnered with a large manufacturing company and is completing head-on with global multinational brands.

The haircare journey

Tarryn Gill has had a long and established career in the media industry. During her tenure, she became exposed to the world of black haircare,

“When I was doing Elle Female Factor, I experienced a great moment where I began looking at the kinds of research that was coming up about the African black female category.”Gill adds that she was fascinated at how fast the upward trajectory was moving, and as such, she soon realised that she wanted to create a solution that could fill a gap for women in the African black female category.

Haircare roots

One of the projects that Gill undertook during her media days was helping to launch a salon. The salon was very active in premium black hair care. Unfortunately, the salon didn’t see much success and soon enough, the owner decided to sell Gill her stock and Gill managed to sell off the products so quickly, confirming what she thought about the gap in the market.

“The multinationals had not come through to flood the market yet,” says Gill, adding that there were only one or two local products that were attempting to break into an industry that’s been traditionally dominated by Unilever, Procter&Gamble, L’Oréal, and Amca.

Getting the perfect hair

In 2014, after a year and a half of development and research. However, 2016 was when the brand received its big break thanks to being featured in Clicks outlets,

“I felt like we were on this African Frontier because we were coming up against these enormous conglomerates of brands. However, there was such an appetite for locally-manufactured products made for women by women” says Gill.

Gill said she saw early on that retailers Clicks, Sorbet and Edgars were aware that more and more people were becoming sensitive to locally-made, trusted products. Clearly, when it came to buying products for consumers, the cornerstone was trust.

However, the good news didn’t stop there. In 2020, the brand partnered up with a very strategic business partner. The partner’s expertise all lies in supply chain, logistics and retail dynamics.

Dealing with bad hair (business) days 

Like our hair, every business has its challenges. There are a few important lessons that Gill has taken from each situation.

Lesson #1: You are not alone

“The first hard lesson I learned was that you cannot go it alone.” explains Gill. While her experience in media provided her with many skills, it also gave her the idea that she can work solo.

Unfortunately, as she ventured into the haircare business, she soon realized that she can’t do that. She realized that if she wanted things to work seamlessly together, then she’d have to become a team player.

“You cannot do it alone and if you do try, you’ll go very slowly,” she says. Thus, she quickly embraced the importance of strategic partnership, and she moved to collaborate with Sunpac, an incredibly gifted and talented team in the supply chain logistics and retail departments.

“Being an all-black female-led company, we felt like we were pioneers, especially because we were up against all these these enormous global brands with massive budgets” says Gill, “Yes, the retailers made room for us, but that meant that our businesses had to withstand all the challenges, the cost centres, and the cash flow analyses of the multi-conglomerates and that was an enormous learning curve so as a result, we had to very quickly on pull in partners and expertise.”

Lesson #2: Change with the times

“After I really experienced two or three bad moments, I learned not to underestimate how quickly things can go wrong”

Gill says they learned very quickly to band aid, readjust, pivot and reshape.

“You’ll notice that in just a space of a few years, we became more eco-friendly in our packaging and our formulas also changed” says Gill. She adds that they even changed how they position themselves on the shelves as well as their pricing models.

“As we started realized the exponential saturation in the industry, we just had to keep shifting”

Lesson #3: There’s only one you

“Just do you”

Gill says that staying true to who you are is important.

The future of good hair

Thanks to the current strategic partnership, Gill is able to develop products that are specifically designed for retailers where they know the audience.

“You’ll see a lot more coming out of the company in the product development and design space that caters more to customers from a retail space,” says Gill. However, she does add that the brand has no intention of leaving anyone behind,

 “Prices should not be exclusionary to any consumer so I’m starting to diversify our product offerings…I’m even looking at one of the biggest direct marketing catalogue beauty suppliers in the world where we’re currently designing a range with them that will hopefully launch in April 2022…What I produce must meet what she needs and she wants – that’s my job and I’m loving it.”

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