Boston-born JerDrema (Dreme) Flynt has already walked several paths in her life, from teaching at Beacon Academy in Boston and the Guangzhou Huamei International School in China, to completing her MBA at Babson’s Graduate School of Business. Now, she’s adding startup founder to that list of roles.
Flynt is building Growing Hands, a platform to support Black and Brown people with their hair journeys. It will have a place to design hair boards of different styles, connect with hairstylists and share hair care tips. Flynt is currently looking for beta testers for her platform as she gears up for its prototype rollout later this year.
Growing up in Dorchester and Roxbury, Flynt attended Cambridge’s Buckingham Browne & Nichols on a full-ride scholarship. She then attended Lake Forest College in Illinois, studying American studies, anthropology and sociology.
Her single mother instilled in her many values, Flynt said, including the importance of education.
“You work through the system, you learn about the system and you figure out how you want to be a better part of our greater society,” Flynt said.
An educator turned tech founder
Coming out of college, Flynt felt called to become a teacher and work against racism in the education system. She also wanted to help children have conversations about topics like gender, race and the environment, in addition to their traditional lessons. This led her to a master’s in education program at the University of California, Los Angeles. After that, Flynt went on to hold several teaching roles until 2020.
Around that time, Flynt developed an interest in moving into education administration to try and create more system-level change. But from her perspective, all of the administrators were “white with an MBA.” To be taken more seriously, Flynt decided to apply for Babson’s MBA program.
“(Babson) said they were able to think about problems creatively. That’s what sold me. For me, I was like, 'I don’t want to build a business. I want to study about racism in business school,'” Flynt said.
In the end, she went on to do both.
Building a platform
Flynt first began thinking about building a company during a blockchain venture course led by Professor Steve Derezinski. Initially, Flynt began thinking of her venture as a way to get more Black people using blockchain. Derezinski gave her some advice for finding her business idea: Find a consistent problem impacting Black people.
“I was like: Hair. Our hair is always talked about. It’s something that’s been talked about my entire life,” Flynt said.
The following summer, she spent time interviewing people about their haircare journeys and the challenges they’ve encountered.
“The problem is that we don’t have a streamlined process,” Flynt said. People are using Pinterest to create hair boards of different designs, StyleSeat to book stylist appointments and Google to search for solutions to hair questions, Flynt said.
Flynt returned to Babson and worked with Professor Ruben Mancha and Cheryl Kiser, executive director of The Institute for Social Innovation, to refine the idea for Growing Hands.
“Let’s give you the ability to design those pieces. Let’s give you the ability to connect to the hairstylist and the people you need. And then, be able to figure out where to buy the stuff,” Flynt said. “Let’s streamline it and let’s make this process simpler for anybody who has Black hair, big hair, thick hair, curly hair.”
Flynt said she and her designer and developer aim to have a prototype done at the end of the summer. In the meantime, Flynt will take part of this year to complete a Fulbright teaching assistantship in South Africa. She plans to keep working remotely on Growing Hands while abroad.
Once beta users test the prototype, Flynt plans to launch Growing Hands in Boston and grow the users and hairstylists on the platform.
Flynt foresees introducing ads and sponsorships to the site as a form of revenue, and potentially a tiered subscription model with additional content.
While it's a business, Flynt also sees Growing Hands as a movement. She wants to help multiracial families navigate hair care, push forward legislation to ban hair discrimination and teach student stylists how to care for Black and Brown people’s hair.
“I’m an educator at the end of the day. We still have all this space where we can really help different types of communities,” Flynt said. “The platform is not just a platform. It’s a movement.”
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