Dawn Myers is providing a solution to an age-old issue for Black women, the work invested in home hair care, i.e., doing it yourself. Myers applied her business background and life experience to develop and develop her Richualist, a tech-based product for textured hair.
The product has a hard-launch date of March 31, and days ahead of that, Myers stopped by rolling out to discuss her career and product.
What problem does your product solve?
If you have any sisters or watched your mom go through a wash day, then you know that for women with natural, curly, kinky hair, the process of washing and styling our hair is very cumbersome.
For those of us who have type 3, type 4 hair, [which are curly hair textures], you’re looking at anywhere between 2 and 5 hours for styling every time we wash. That is crazy. That means every time you have a meeting, every time I have a pitch, every time I have a date, every time I have whatever, I have to find three hours in my day, and I don’t have an extra three hours lying around, nor do most women, so this becomes a really charged pain point for a lot of us.
It makes it difficult for us to travel. it makes us difficult for us to work out, it’s really difficult to schedule around. So we created a technology that streamlines the processes, the hardest processes of wash day. The detangling, conditioning our products, applying those products, we’ve created a system that does it faster and easier than we’ve seen before. We partnered with a lot of big manufacturers in order to test and refine that technology. Now, we’re bringing it to market.
You mentioned some of your funds at the beginning of establishing your business came from real estate investing. Do you plan to re-enter real estate at all?
Yes, I will definitely hop back into real estate investing. I know it, it feels comfortable to me in a very unstable economy, but right now, my focus is 100% on solving this issue for this consumer and establishing that Black women can build venture-backable businesses.
We are one of 170 or so Black women-led companies that have been able to raise over a million dollars in venture, and it’s really important for me that we put points on the board, generate the revenue and get the acquisition that supports other Black women [and] provides precedent for other Black women raising [money] for their companies.
How can other Black women raise that much?
As you mentioned, there’s a lot of free money out there, and all of the applications are exactly the same. They’re all the same questions, and your answer may change very slightly, but it’s going to be some version of the same answer.
What we use is a language database, where I put all of the questions we typically get in a spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, I’ve got a bunch of different answers … then what we did was take on some very inexpensive labor, some interns who came on, we taught them the system and showed them research, different grants and to how to apply to those grants. With that system, we were able to raise $100,000 in [un]diluted funding.
