The Wild Curl crowdfunds to fight against hair discrimination
by Startacus Admin
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The Wild Curl launches crowdfunding campaign to help with its mission of disrupting the beauty industry and fighting against continuous hair discrimination
After facing many years of struggles to find products for curly hair, Vanessa Martins Lopes is now aiming to disrupt the beauty industry and fight against continuous hair discrimination curly consumers are facing. Her brand, The Wild Curl, has launched a £60k equity crowdfunding campaign through the FCA regulated platform, Crowdcube, to support the beauty of curly hair.
Born in Finland, a country with very little ethnical diversity, Vanessa was not able to find the right products or knowledge to care for her curls. Alongside the marginal product offering, she also faced extreme social pressure to fit into the “straight hair” beauty standards. Vanessa, the CEO, and co-founder said: "When I look at old pictures from my youth, I notice that my hair was always tied to a ponytail, never open. Trying to fit into the Eurocentric beauty standards, I ended up ‘taming’ my hair instead of loving and embracing its natural curls. I didn’t have the confidence to wear a full afro until I was a 20-year-old.”
The Wild Curl journey started in the basement flat in London and after a couple of years trading their vegan tailor-made curly hair products, they already generated more than £100,000 in revenue and now growing 20% MoM, listed in Amazon Prime in five countries and with multiple retailers across Europe. Despite facing entrepreneurial challenges on the way, Vanessa is incredibly proud of their achievements: “It makes me extremely happy to know that we have changed the lives of more than 5000 women around the world already! Which is beyond double great. But we want to see if we can take a giant leap in reaching our real goal: Equal hair care for everyone, everywhere! This is why we are raising our first-ever funding round.”
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To accelerate growth, expand the team, and fund further development of new products, The Wild Curl is now crowdfunding through Crowdcube. Within the first 24h of going live with the campaign, they already achieved more than 90% of the target. Now looking to overfund, The Wild Curl offers interested investors the opportunity to join their movement and support their cause before the campaign closes.
For decades now, curly hair consumers have been overlooked by the hair care industry, even though 65-70% of the women in the world have textured hair, which is more than 1B consumers. Additionally, recent studies have shown that women with textured hair spend 78% more on products than women with straight hair, making this an enormous, untapped market opportunity. Despite this huge opportunity, the hair care industry historically has paid little attention to this market. Seeing this continuous discriminatory treatment, Vanessa decided to take matters into her own hands and build a company devoted solely to curly hair - this is how The Wild Curl was founded.
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Published on: 21st December 2020
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