Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Google Play • Spotify
When Mielle Organics founder and CEO Monique Rodriguez started the textured hair-care brand in her kitchen 10 years ago, her goal was to create healthy organic products for her textured hair.
Now, a decade later, Mielle Organics has become a household name and staple for many consumers with varying hair types. The brand is distributed in over 87 countries and over 100,000 stores across the U.S. In January 2023, Mielle Organics was acquired by consumer goods company Procter & Gamble for an undisclosed sum.
On this week’s episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Rodriguez discusses what’s next for Mielle Organics under the new ownership and what it means to be a 10-year-old beauty brand in 2024.
Excerpts from the discussion, below, have been lightly edited for clarity.
The road to acquisition
“In the beginning, it was purely just bootstrapping … we cleaned out our 401Ks and used all the money we had, and every time we got paid, we would invest that into the business. That was how we initially got everything off the ground. We continued to make money off of the sales from DTC because we were DTC first, and we continued to reinvest that back in the business. One of the challenges I faced as a small Black-owned business was the lack of resources and access to capital. … We just put our foot on the gas pedal, and the company grew, and we grew so fast that we outgrew our financial infrastructure. When it came to expanding into retail, we got our first call from Sally Beauty. … .We entered into Sally Beauty in 2016, and we were very fortunate enough to take out a loan from a friend of my husband who was able to loan us money to finance the inventory to go into Sally Beauty. That came with a very high cost for us to pay back because the banks were not interested in giving a loan out to a business that had only been in business for a year. From that moment, we just continued to grow, and we didn’t take any outside financing outside of that until 2020 when we partnered with the New Voices Fund. While it was very challenging to bootstrap and not have those resources, one of the best pieces of advice I received was from a CFO we had brought on board when we partnered with New Voices. He told us, ‘The best time to raise capital is when you don’t need it because it gives you a lot of leverage, and it gives you a negotiating power.’ That was something we had to learn from experience because I knew how it felt trying to raise money when I needed it. … We went through a period in 2018 where we weren’t profitable and we were trying to raise money, and it was very challenging. It was tough. No one wanted to invest in us because we were not profitable. So when we became profitable and we got the new CFO on board, what he told me always stuck with me. When we got to a place of high negotiating power, I told my husband, ‘We need to go for another fundraising round because I know the leverage we have, and I want to utilize it and maximize it while the momentum is hot.”
On textured hair care becoming a booming category
“It’s great that we’re moving in the right direction, and there’s more representation because representation matters. When I was growing up, when I looked at the beauty space and I looked at all the products on the aisles, there was a lack of authenticity. There was a lack of representation of people that I felt looked like me and understood my hair needs and my hair challenges — there was not a lot of diversity. … You only saw a European straight-hair look — there was no one on the red carpet that was embracing their natural curls. … That void in the market provided me the opportunity to provide education. It also gave me an opportunity to provide that representation, to be the example for our community to see someone who looks like them and has curly hair who is not only going to just sell you products but also educate you on how to use the products and the right techniques to use the products. [I wanted] to empower women to feel good about their natural selves, embrace their natural beauty and rock their natural curls, because when you look good, you feel good. And you especially feel good when you’ve learned how to master something that we’ve been told for so many years has been difficult to maintain. …
That’s another reason why partnering with P&G has been so helpful in our journey — because they have access to data and insights that we didn’t have access to. [That data] helps us understand our consumers even more and to study our consumer even more and understand their behavior and meet their needs and simplify their hair-care regimen. We’re innovating in hair constantly and also expanding into new categories — skin care is something I’ve been very interested in.”
Mielle’s top priorities moving forward
“Innovation and continuing to meet the needs of our ever-changing consumer are always going to be the top priority for us. I like to say we start with the consumer and we end with the consumer in everything we do. He or she is always top of mind. So, as we think about expanding into new categories, we’re going to do that by having a close relationship with the data points of our consumer’s behavior. … The technology, marketing and branding aesthetic that we’re about to roll out is truly amazing. … Just being the brand that stays ahead of culture, the brand that continues to understand our consumers and continues to meet the consumer needs, and the brand that always continues to serve and give back to the community that we serve is important.”