Dawn Myers is making it easier to style, detangle, and care for curly hair

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Dawn Myers usually wears her hair in a large afro, and anyone with an afro can attest that wash days—the routine of washing and styling textured hair—are often tedious. They require a lot of detangling, product, styling, and, well, time.

道恩·迈尔斯（Dawn Myers）通常留着一个大大的爆炸头，任何留过爆炸头的人都能证明，洗头日——即清洗和打理纹理发质的日常——往往非常繁琐。这需要大量的梳理、护发产品、造型，以及相当多的时间。

“I was watching ‘Shark Tank,’ and there was another curly girl idea,” she recalled of a day around eight years ago, when a pitch for a hair product aired. She started thinking about all the hair tools on the market, like blow dryers and curling irons, “things that straighten and change the chemistry of our naturally curly hair,” she told TechCrunch, adding that it takes around an hour and 20 minutes to wash and style her own hair.

“当时我正在看《创智赢家》（Shark Tank），节目里提到了另一个关于卷发的创意，”她回忆起大约八年前的一天，当时节目中正在推介一款美发产品。她开始思考市场上所有的美发工具，比如吹风机和卷发棒，“这些东西会拉直我们的天然卷发，改变其化学性质，”她告诉TechCrunch，并补充说她自己洗头和做造型大约需要一小时二十分钟。

None of those tools help with that, and for Myers, it highlighted a gap that has always existed in the beauty hardware space — a lack of tooling for textured hair. It’s a space that’s complex, expensive, and just overlooked.

这些工具都无法解决这个问题，对迈尔斯来说，这凸显了美容硬件领域一直存在的一个空白——缺乏针对纹理发质的工具。这是一个复杂、昂贵且被忽视的领域。

“If you think back to slavery, we were mandated to cover our hair. That’s where do-rags come from. You had to cover your hair. Why? Because our hair was seen as ugly and unkempt and unacceptable,” she said. Later came hot combs, chemical relaxers, and flat irons, all of which straighten textured hair.

“回想奴隶制时期，我们被强制要求遮盖头发。这就是杜格（do-rags）的由来。你必须遮住头发。为什么？因为我们的头发被视为丑陋、邋遢且不可接受的，”她说。后来出现了热梳、化学直发剂和直发夹板，所有这些都是为了拉直纹理发质。

“It’s only been the past 15 years or so where women of color and Black women in particular and, quite frankly, white women as well have really felt comfortable exposing their naturally curly hair and really just embracing it.”

“直到过去15年左右，有色人种女性，尤其是黑人女性，坦率地说，还有白人女性，才真正感到可以自在地展示她们的天然卷发，并真正拥抱它。”

Soon after that episode aired, she whipped out a legal pad and sketched out a business idea, then went to Ace Hardware and CVS and put together a “Frankenstein-looking prototype.” Her idea eventually became the company Richualist, which is known for its product Mint, a hair tool that helps detangle, condition, gel, and style in a single stroke using refillable product pods.

在那期节目播出后不久，她拿出一本便签纸勾勒出了一个商业构想，然后去了Ace Hardware和CVS，拼凑出了一个“看起来像科学怪人一样的原型机”。她的想法最终演变成了Richualist公司，该公司以其产品Mint而闻名，这是一款美发工具，通过可填充的产品舱，可以在一次梳理中完成解结、护理、涂抹发胶和造型。

It even has warming technology to gently heat the product before it’s applied. “We get that styling time down to about seven to 10 minutes,” she said. “It’s a massive game changer for the customer really stressed out by wash day.”

它甚至配备了加热技术，可以在产品涂抹前对其进行温和加热。“我们将造型时间缩短到了大约7到10分钟，”她说。“对于那些被洗头日折磨得精疲力竭的顾客来说，这是一个巨大的改变。”

She said her product, which also comes in travel size, helps make hair a bit healthier, reducing shedding and breakage by up to 70% since people no longer need to tug endlessly on their strands as they wash and style. She built it with the materials science company Dow, after an early prototype caught the company’s attention during a startup accelerator program.

她说，她的产品还有旅行装，有助于让头发更健康，减少高达70%的脱发和断发，因为人们在洗头和造型时不再需要无休止地拉扯发丝。在一次创业加速器项目中，她的早期原型机引起了材料科学公司陶氏（Dow）的注意，随后她与该公司合作开发了这款产品。

“It just so happens that Dow had identified this white space recently as well, and they were starting a textured hair care unit,” she said. “So they ended up collaborating with us and giving us a lot of engineering help and manufacturing guidance.”

“恰好陶氏最近也发现了这个空白市场，他们当时正在组建一个纹理发质护理部门，”她说。“所以他们最终与我们合作，为我们提供了大量的工程支持和制造指导。”

Even though she eventually became one of the first 100 Black women to raise more than $1 million in venture funding, the early days were rough. “It’s really impossible to get hardware funded,” she continued. “It’s even more impossible to get it funded when we’re talking about such a niche problem.”

尽管她最终成为首批筹集到超过100万美元风险投资的100位黑人女性之一，但早期阶段非常艰难。“硬件融资真的太难了，”她继续说道。“当我们谈论的是这样一个细分领域的问题时，融资就更不可能了。”

She recalled the early meetings with executives in the beauty industry. “There are no people who look like me in those R&D suites.” In fact, she said, when she described wash days, “these people didn’t know what a wash day was. They didn’t understand that there’s this whole process that their customers have to go through.”

她回忆起与美容行业高管的早期会议。“在那些研发部门里，没有长得像我这样的人。”事实上，她说，当她描述洗头日时，“这些人根本不知道什么是洗头日。他们不明白他们的客户必须经历这样一个完整的流程。”

She would tell them how painful and arduous the process is. “And the powers that be, up until this point, did not know,” she continued. “Even the bonds in our hair are totally different than other technology types. We really do need bespoke technology.”

她会告诉他们这个过程是多么痛苦和艰巨。“而那些掌权者，直到现在都还不知道，”她继续说道。“甚至我们头发中的化学键也与其他发质完全不同。我们确实需要定制化的技术。”

Myers sold her home and liquidated her 401(k) retirement account to fund the initial development of this product. “That was a crazy bet, but it paid off,” she said. “We were able to get about $1.4 million in the door to commercialize the product and just validate it.”

迈尔斯卖掉了自己的房子，并清算了她的401(k)退休账户，为该产品的初步开发提供资金。“那是一场疯狂的赌博，但得到了回报，”她说。“我们成功筹集到了约140万美元，用于产品的商业化和验证。”

Overall, it took about five years of development to get the product to “a place where it made sense to the customer,” she said, adding that her team also had to conduct their own research in the space since what they needed — like how much product the average person with textured hair uses — didn’t yet exist.

总的来说，产品开发大约花了五年时间才达到“让客户觉得合理”的程度，她说，并补充道，她的团队还必须在该领域进行自己的研究，因为他们所需要的数据——比如普通纹理发质人群使用多少产品——当时还不存在。

Then, in 2022, just as she was about to expand and go to market, she was diagnosed with stage three colorectal cancer. “We ended up closing our round while I was still going through treatment,” she recalled, saying the round took “forever” to close. She remembers sitting in the chemo chair at Johns Hopkins, on her laptop, trying to close deals.

然后，在2022年，就在她准备扩张并进入市场时，她被诊断出患有三期结直肠癌。“我们最终在我还在接受治疗时完成了融资，”她回忆道，并表示这轮融资花了“太久”才完成。她记得自己坐在约翰霍普金斯医院的化疗椅上，用笔记本电脑努力敲定交易。

She applied to Shark Tank in 2023 and appeared on the show later that year, though the episode aired in 2024. “I was still wearing a binder around my abdomen [a compression wrap] under the dress I wore for my ‘Shark Tank’ experience,” she said.

她在2023年申请参加《创智赢家》，并于同年晚些时候出现在节目中，尽管该集是在2024年播出的。“在参加《创智赢家》时，我穿的裙子下面还缠着腹带（一种压力绷带），”她说。

She ended up nabbing a deal from investor Mark Cuban and serial entrepreneur Emma Grede, which helped her formally launch the product. Grede then helped it expand into Ulta’s online website earlier this year. “We’re actually about to market ourselves as sold out,” she said, adding that the company is mapping out ways to expand further.

她最终从投资者马克·库班（Mark Cuban）和连续创业者艾玛·格雷德（Emma Grede）那里获得了投资，这帮助她正式推出了产品。格雷德随后在今年早些时候帮助该产品扩展到了Ulta的在线网站。“我们实际上快要宣布售罄了，”她说，并补充说公司正在规划进一步扩张的途径。

Her company was picked as one of TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield 200 startups this year, earning a spot at TechCrunch Disrupt, the publication’s annual startup conference, which kicks off this Tuesday. When asked how she first heard about Disrupt, she laughed. “I mean, who doesn’t know about Disrupt?”

她的公司今年被选为TechCrunch“创业战场200强”（Startup Battlefield 200）初创企业之一，获得了参加TechCrunch Disrupt的机会，这是该媒体的年度创业大会，将于本周二开幕。当被问及她是如何第一次听说Disrupt时，她笑了。“我的意思是，谁不知道Disrupt呢？”

She said she’s bracing herself, as an introvert, for all the people she will meet and conversations she will have. “But what I am most excited for is textured hair to be sitting on the stage with some of the most sophisticated tech in the space.”

她说，作为一个内向的人，她正在为即将见到的人和进行的对话做心理准备。“但我最兴奋的是，纹理发质护理能够与该领域一些最尖端的技术一同登上舞台。”