A young CEO has opened up about how she managed to create and grow a successful seven-figure company and the battles she faces as a young female entrepreneur.
Chloe Homan, 32, from Tennessee, will freely admit that she had no idea how to manage her curly hair in her younger years. But even still, she embraced her curls, despite the hairstyle being "frowned upon" in the late 90s and early 2000s.
After years of trial and error, Chloe finally figured out how to handle her curls properly. She's now used that knowledge to establish her own businesses, providing products to help other people with curly hair.
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She explained: "I am really happy to see that what I do is improving the confidence of curly-haired people to embrace who we really are. It's beautiful getting to be that difference maker."
Chloe kickstarted her enterprise by sharing her personal tips and hacks online, helping others just like her. Initially, she started a social media marketing company, but it wasn't long before she wanted to create her own products for fellow curlies.
Regarding their common frustration, she highlighted the issue with using hair ties, bands, and other accessories, which tend to snap or even damage curls when used with curly hair. Chloe came up with a clever idea to make products that are big enough to protect curls and match different hair types and colours.
Her company, Curlfriend Collective, makes things like scrunchies, scarves, hair ties, bands, clips and pillowcases that cost between $5 to $95. Last year, her company sold 12,000 items and they've sold 20,000 worldwide. They have a small team of six people and Chloe says being a young boss is great but sometimes tough.
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She's had to deal with feeling like she's not good enough and finding it hard to ask for help. Chloe, who now lives in Wisconsin, shared: "Together with Curlfriend Collective and @frizzandfrillzz, my social media marketing business, I've built a seven-figure business based on curls.
"However, for Curlfriend Collective alone, we've built a half-million-dollar business in under two years and are on target to be a million-dollar standalone business in 2024 - fully bootstrapped with zero investors. While the business has been very successful, there are challenges to being a young CEO.
"I feel like I have to do everything by myself because I'm a woman. I have thought, 'People don't help serve me' and it's been a process of unlearning to get out of that. Whereas male CEOs reach out to their network all the time for resources, knowledge, money, and investments, and I've had to learn that I can do that too.
"I think there's always some impostor syndrome too. When Curlfriend Collective, our self-care accessory business, was launched, I did think, 'Can I actually do this?' But I also have another side to me that's a little delusional in some ways where I'm like, 'The only thing that's stopping me is me, right?'
"It quickly became apparent that the delusional side of me was right when the business took off. While it can be a little lonely at times, it's ultimately very empowering being a young CEO and being able to serve people like myself.
"It was frowned upon to wear your hair naturally when I was growing up. It was seen as unkept and unprofessional, and there really weren't any resources out there for people like me who wanted to embrace their curls.
"We wanted to create products that are not only really functional for our hair but also really beautiful - accessories that make us feel even more confident when we wear them. It took about nine months for us to bring the products to the market just because curls are so misunderstood, we had problems like the ties not being stretchy enough - or the suppliers not giving us enough fabric to work with curly hair types.
"My advice to any young women who want to set up a business is to just do it. Fail forward. We all have so much in us that we can achieve, but we have to allow ourselves to believe we can. We have to get out of our own way and just say, 'You know what, I'm going to do it. If I fail, you know what? That's okay.'
"Every time you do learn from your mistakes, you don't make that mistake again. Then you can take your next step forward and see what you can achieve."
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