Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve heard of Miss Jessie’s natural hair care products and if you are a woman with curly hair, there’s a strong possibility you have a jar of Curly Pudding in your bathroom. I know I do. In 2004, founders Miko and Titi Branch took the curly world by storm with Miss Jessie’s products made specifically for curly, kinky, and wavy hair. For many woman of color this was a godsend. Now Miko Branch is giving you the tea on how it all went down in her business guide, Miss Jessie’s- Creating a Successful Business from Scratch. BOSSY! was lucky to catch up with the busy entrepreneur turned author to chat about it.
BOSSY!: In case some of my readers haven’t heard the story, let them know a bit about how you and your sister started Miss Jessie’s.
Miko: My sister Titi Branch and I started our business from scratch. We had no loans, no angel investors, no real contacts, but we did have our God given talent and each other. Titi and I pooled our talents together. Titi’s talents were she was a great organizer, a great communicator and she was just super smart. She was a great big sister and I was a great little sister. I was always good at hair. So together we joined up and Titi called every single person in New York to see if they needed hair styling services.
Eventually it was a referral form a woman named Sonia Alleyne who was working at Black Elegance Magazine that put us in contact with our first big ad campaign It was Ashley Stewart, which is a retail chain for full figured woman. We made 8,000 dollars from that job. That was our seed money to start our salon.
After that we just built out business slowly but surely learning a lot of lessons along the way. We reinvested our profits back in the business and kept building from there.