People use all sorts of methods to determine the best products for their own hair.
Why not use science?
That’s the question Lemma Labs co-founders Dalar Bansal and Clare Plunkett are asking as they debut HairID, a kit that measures things like thickness, damage level and porosity of a person’s hair.
Customers order the kit and then send it back to Lemma’s Buffalo-based laboratory for analysis. Instead of relying on marketing, pseudoscience or guesswork, they analyze the hair's specific properties hair and what kind of products would be compatible.
“We use science to optimize hair care,” said Plunkett, chief operating officer. “We analyze the samples in our lab and then send them back a digital report detailing all the information they’d ever want to know about their hair.”
Bansal, the company’s CEO, has a Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
She noticed that consumers were making connections between their hair properties and the products they buy – but there was no existing test that combined accuracy and affordability. A full HairID assessment retails at $198 on the Lemma Labs website.
Lemma Labs was officially formed about a year ago, with a pilot study conducted in late 2020. The product officially launched this summer.
The co-founders are now preparing for a marketing blitz that catches the eyes of consumers, while also building relationships with salons, which are a potential distribution channel.
“We bring the science part of it,” Bansal said. “They bring the intuition and the art. We feel there is a lot of potential in combining those two.”
The company is bootstrapped for now and just starting to build bridges in the Buffalo startup community – Plunkett and her husband recently moved back to Buffalo from New York City.
The duo is working on a database that provides ongoing recommendations to customers who have their hair tested. But they are consciously avoiding affiliations or partnerships with the products they recommend.
“The important thing right now is gaining the trust of our clients,” Bansal said. “People need to know that all of our recommendations are coming strictly from our understanding of the properties and ingredients in these products.”
