Kerlyne Jean-Baptiste, founder of afro-textured hair care startup KerlyGirl, calls herself “KerlyGirl’s first customer.”
A Massachusetts native who moved to Providence in 2012 to begin her undergraduate degree at Brown University, Jean-Baptiste had always been in the minority, surrounded mostly by white folks. In 2014, that changed: Jean-Baptiste spent a semester in Senegal, an experience that would quickly prove transformative.
“I found this new sense of self-worth and self-confidence after studying abroad in Senegal and seeing other women like me,” Jean-Baptiste said. “Right in the middle of study abroad, I shaved my head. It was great in an equatorial environment, but when I got back to Massachusetts and Rhode Island, I was like, ‘Whoa.’”
Not only did Jean-Baptiste have to readjust to the scalp-chilling cold of New England; she also found herself running up against walls trying to find products for her newly growing 4C hair. At the closest retailer, CVS, she’d be lucky if she found a product with olive oil in it, let alone a line of products catered to her kinky curls.
Jean-Baptiste began ordering raw materials online and mixing hair products in her dorm room at Brown. She shared the products with family and friends, and over time, the little workshop grew. By the time she graduated, she had people in her network ordering KerlyGirl products through a Google form.
“We always joked about, ‘We should make this a business,’” Jean-Baptiste said. “When I think about that time, I think, 'Words are very powerful.'”
In 2018, nearly four years after she’d left Senegal, Jean-Baptiste launched a website and incorporated KerlyGirl. Today, KerlyGirl is a fully fledged B2C startup, selling hair masks, curl creams, serums and more through its e-commerce site. Its products are specifically catered to people with Type 3 and 4 hair — the very tightest coils — and are all plant-based, COSMOS-certified organic.
KerlyGirl started the year by participating in Social Enterprise Greenhouse (SEG)’s Social Impact Accelerator, one of the many accelerators that went remote mid-program. Jean-Baptiste credits SEG — especially Meg Wirth, the nonprofit’s health and wellness initiative director — with helping KerlyGirl advance on its business plan, prepare to pitch to angel investors and grow, all in spite of the pandemic.
“If Covid-19 made life hard, it made life for Black women harder,” Jean-Baptiste said. “I think Meg was very cognizant of that. She took a liking to me and, I guess, had a personal mission to keep in touch with me, sending me grants and little opportunities, reading my applications. That was super important to me.”
KerlyGirl was also one of six finalists in Get Started Rhode Island this year, a local version of Atlanta-based Cox Business’s pitch competitions across the country.
As Jean-Baptiste noted, though, she was the only Black woman founder on stage. She takes pride in her status, but she also hopes to be see other Black women entrepreneurs being recognized at pitch contests and by investors. Ventures founded by Black women, she pointed out, have one of the highest returns on investment among all startups.
“I am a solo founder, and I take a lot of pride in being a company founder as a Black woman,” Jean-Baptiste said. “In this time, crafting a new vision for our country, that needs to happen locally, communally and intimately, and I’m able to do that with my budding venture.”
Jean-Baptiste is looking to bring in outside funding. Eventually, Jean-Baptiste said, she could envision KerlyGirl products in a brick-and-mortar store like the Providence CVS that disappointed her so many years ago. For now, though, her target audience is people like her: Millennial and Gen-Z Black women who are digital natives and want to learn about the possibilities of their hair.
Five years from now, the vision is more ambitious.
“I want KerlyGirl’s vision to match its social impact and its customer impact,” Jean-Baptiste said. “I want KerlyGirl to be a multimillion-dollar company. I want us to have impacted the health and hair of over 100,000 Black women and their friends. I want people to understand that curly-haired folks have a space in the market. I want KerlyGirl to be a vanguard in that.”
