Building Something for Us, by Us

What we sell isn’t physical. What we sell to our clients is less energy and less money devoted to hair care.

- MAYOWA OSINOWO, CEO & FOUNDER of GLIMMER 411

Watching Mayowa Osinowo munch happily on her homemade sherbert you’d never think that beyond the surface was the story of a young woman who (when in her senior year of college) nearly single-handedly started Glimmer 411—the company destined to spearhead the new direction of the haircare industry.

Two years after initially founding Glimmer 411, Mayowa is at her second full-time job and celebrating the launch of Curl Cupid™, Glimmer 411’s all-encompassing hair care platform unlike any other. Backed by science and anchored in questions about your holistic health, Curl Cupid™ creates tailor-made recommendations that can take your curls to the next level.

But how did Mayowa get here?

It all started with a pretty small issue. Small that is until you think about the countless curly-headed cuties who’ve faced the same gut-wrenching distress after countless failed attempts at finding products that suit their hair. In Mayowa’s case, she’d stayed in the U.S. the summer of 2018 to intern at IBM. While ecstatic for the opportunity, this meant she couldn’t return to her home country of Nigeria to get her usual haircare or hair products. Though she was nervous about what this entailed for her budding natural hair journey, she buckled down and figured she’d be ok. In actuality, she ended up getting her hair done by someone completely incompatible with her hair type. The result, let alone the overall experience, was overwhelmingly frustrating.

Mayowa knew she wasn’t the only one who was going through this, “feeling left out about something that was so simple, and that should be so simple”. It was then that the idea of Glimmer 411 was born.

She began to lay the building blocks for Glimmer 411 using the skills she picked up in the business classes she took at her alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. Months of single-handedly researching the latest haircare trends, gaps in the market, and developing the software for what would evolve into Curl Cupid™ Mayowa decided to test herself and her budding company when she entered the 2019 McGinnis Venture Competition.

She blazed through the first round of the competition, made it through the second round, but in that gray area between her second-round success and the coming 3rd and final round—anxiety and stress began to fester. “I’d made it this far but I still had so much doubt,” Mayowa said, “it just seemed like I could do no right. I had to give a live presentation for the third round, I cried almost every other day thinking about it. Glimmer 411 was my baby and I had never presented it to other people on such a large scale before”.

It was then that Glimmer 411 began to really expand, “I called my sister (our Director of Content & Communications) crying and she reminded me ‘Don’t you have a team?’ She was right, I didn’t have to do it all alone. I called Mecca (our Chief Marketing Technology Officer) for help too. He and my sister made me the most beautiful slides, it gave me the confidence I needed.”

With her team behind her, Mayowa won 2nd place and all the accolades that came with it. The fruits of her labor had finally ripened.

“It was the first time that other people who owed me nothing validated the idea, validated me really because the idea began to change.”

At the time of the competition Glimmer 411 was actually called Glow Up and the original focus was to match clients with stylists who could meet their needs. Our company’s transformation into the Glimmer 411 you all know and love today happened after the team came to an important realization.

“We realized it wasn't really about the hairstyling experience—it was about the lack of information across all the different aspects about hair. Once we realized that the problem was information and not having adequate or personalized access to it, it changed the way we approached all of our products and made our company better”.

The result of all that revamping: Curl Cupid™.

With so many “personalized” weight-loss or makeup quizzes that really just lump you in a bucket with every other user, Mayowa is no stranger to the bias many in her target market may have formed against using the Curl Cupid™ which includes a holistic hair health quiz.

“Quiz fatigue is real,” she said with a sigh, “but the value Curl Cupid™ brings is really hard to put in a bucket. With questions designed to cover everything from your day-to-day life to the quality of the water you use to wash your hair based on your zip code, if you took the quiz again and lied it’d be really hard to replicate the same report twice.”

Since its beta version launched back in February of 2020, hundreds of people have taken our premier Curl Cupid™ quiz. And what exactly do they have to say about it?

“They’re usually surprised that it actually works. It either helps them finally get in touch with a product that works for them or confirms something they’ve been using for ages that really fulfills their needs.”

Being connected to her community has been at the core of Mayowa’s mission from the very beginning. Building relationships and engaging in discourse with people who have similar experiences to her are even listed among her favorite things to do. This theme is easy to see in the way that Glimmer 411 has expanded.

Sustaining an employee demographic that mirrored her target market was something Mayowa wanted from Glimmer 411’s inception. “I told my advisors that I wanted as much as possible for Black women to be the foundation of Glimmer 411. I was told that was impossible, that I wasn’t going to get Black people period. But I didn’t compromise and I remained adamant about getting people who were living the story behind the business.” Glimmer 411 surely has not fallen short of this vision. Currently, all of our company’s employees are black, and over 80% of those employees are black women.