My League Tale is the founder and chief experience officer of Kurlbox, the first
monthly subscription service for naturally curly hair. An astute businesswoman who prior to venturing
into beauty had a notable career as a public relations executive. My League's ability
to instinctively identify in market popular trends to the masses guarded her opportunities to work
with brands such as Calvin Klein Cosmetics, the Grammy Awards, Nike, and
a stellar roster of clients across the entertainment, tech, and beauty industries since
the launch of CurlBOX in two eleven. Laurel Procter and Gamble, Unilever,
Target, and Walmart is just a short list of brands that have trusted my
League's vision in marketing. She regularly gives inspiring talks around the country centered around
business, personal branding, and women's empowerment. Today we'll hear from my League,
who walks us through her journey to a millie. A million in sales,
a million in revenue, a million followers, or a million in funding.
To amass one million of anything is a major feet and that's why we're
highlighting women who have done just that you'll hear from women who have made their
mark, impacted lives, blaze trails, and amassed a millie. My dream
job as a kid, I was obsessed with beet when I was younger,
Like video soul was my thing, and as soon as I would get home
from school, I would like run to turn on videos. That's what I
remember my mom. If ever I was going to have something taken away,
it would be that I couldn't watch videos, And so I didn't know sort
of like what kind of job I would have, but I knew that it
had to be something related to like music videos. So it doesn't surprise me
that I worked in the music industry first, because I didn't know what I
was going to do. But I was like, I want to be in
the music video. I want to either be in it, I want to
be on the side of it, I want to be up under it.
But I was music video obsessed. My business Kurlbox, started because I was
doing some tech PR at the time, so I would say maybe seven eight
years ago, I was representing I had a tech client, so I'd always
have to read sort of like the tech news, and deep in the tech
news, I read an article about subscriptions making a comeback, and they were
beauty. It was beauty focused, and I knew when I read it that
it was not going to be centered on Black women, and I knew that
black women needed samples more than anyone, and so Anne just needed this subscription
because of how stores just don't tend to cater to us as it relates to
our beauty needs. And so I just was like, this is a fantastic
idea and resurgence, but how can I do something for us? And so
I had the idea. I quit it so many times because I kept saying
to myself, you don't have the skills, you don't have the knowledge,
you don't have the contacts, you don't even really know what you're doing,
So there's no way you could do this. And so every day I talked
myself out of it, but every morning I'd wake up feeling incredibly pregnant with
this idea, until I got to the point that I just had to launch
it. So I fake launched it with like a splash page and collecting email
addresses, and it had so much interest that it sort of forced me to
launch it. And literally the stars just aligned and everything just took off.
Everything I didn't know, somebody came along and offered their services, even as
far as people on Twitter offering to help me for free with things they probably
thought I needed to know. So we have been in business, we have
been running for it'll be seven years in January, which is just crazy.
And now I would say that I am still the chief experience Officer, if
you will, and I'd like to say that the look, the field of
vision, and the products are all me, and then all of the production,
the customer service and all of that stuff is the wonderful team around me.
Even the first day that I launched that splash page, I remember,
like the emails. I had a BlackBerry at the time and I don't have
it. I used to have like I'm I guess, like notifications on or
where I would get an email when someone would sign up, and it was
like thunderous the way these emails were coming in. It was mind blowing how
many people were interested in this, and so at that point I felt successful.
I felt like it had taken off, though I hadn't collected any money
at the time, the way that people were so interested in it, I
knew it was going to take off, I was like, if a thousand
people have signed up in it was like it was like hours. It was
like if a thousand people have signed up in like four or five hours,
and I mean it was just like a thousand every few hours. I was
like, I know that when I get ready to sell this, and my
first round of sales, my first round of sales, I was only letting
in two hundred and thirty five members and that sold out. I want to
say, the very first time I did it, we sold that out in
one week. And then the second time we sold out in twenty four hours,
and then it just kept getting twelve hours, and now we sell out.
I don't even know if we it lasts an hour or two. I
think something that I learned early on when I first started out in PR was
cold calling. A lot of that. I used to do music press,
and then I used to do my quote unquote specialty was daily newspapers. So
if somebody, if someone was coming out with an album, it was my
job to make sure it was reviewed or sort of advanced in all of the
daily papers in the US, and that's a lot of newspapers. And I'd
email, i'd call, and that job and that doing that specifically sort of
built up my I guess you could say my skin for rejection. You know.
So when I launched CurlBOX, it was the ultimate cold call. I
had very little contacts, you know, and I just I had sort of
put together a press list, if you will, of all the beauty brands
that I wanted to contact, And once I got on that phone, it
was like I wasn't even tripping, like I wasn't even sweating it. Like
I was just like, I'm blowing through these calls. Now I'm calling for
something, you know. Now, I'm not calling to ask you to cover
an album. I'm calling to ask you to be a part of something that
I'm so passionate about. And I would say that of all those phone calls
that I made, I think I had like maybe a couple hundred contacts on
that list that I had spent the summer building up I got. You know,
I would say that I got through to about half of those people,
and I got about a quarter of those people to participate. And so I
think that had I been afraid of people being like, so what is it?
And you know, all of that cold calling early in my career built
my skin up and kind of just helped me navigate when people would, you
know, every time somebody would ask me something that maybe I didn't know the
answer, I didn't buckle, you know, I just I just would like,
you know what, I'm going to collect, I'll have all that information
for you, and then I would put it in the email and I have
to go back because they would they would say to me, well, how
many ounces do you want? And I'm like, uh, I don't know,
and but you know in my mind, but I would just say,
you know what, I'm going to take all of this back to the team.
And when I'm talking back to the team, it was like back to
myself, I'm gonna take all of this back to the team, and I'm
gonna get back to you with an email. And that is really being able
to cold call has really helped me in my career. And I didn't even
know, like I know this now because I've been doing this for almost a
decade, but I didn't even know that the typical bottle sizes eight ounces,
you know, but people in the industry and business know that. So when
they're asking me, so that the typical size for a shampoos like eight ounces,
but sometimes the you know, three ounces would be a deluxe sample.
Two ounces would also be a deluxe sample, you know, and then you
have a half ounce and an ounce, and so I can now eyeball all
of that. But at the time, and they were talking all of this,
I was just like clueless. You know, I'm like going to I
had to like go to CVS and look at a bunch of bottles to really
get an idea of what the heck they were talking about. As we dig
more into the origin story in early days of curl Box, I want my
leak to share with us what those very very early days looked like when this
idea was simply just an idea before the movement on the project. What are
the first things that she did? First thing I did was I have a
friend. My best friend went to West Point and his best friend. They
went to West Point together and then they went on to get their NBA's and
every time, you know, we for fun would sit around talking about all
these cool business ideas, and funny enough, my business idea before carol Box
was actually modern day tender, which they shot down. They did not think
it was a good idea, but we talked about my sort of tended idea,
and then we talked about the crow box idea, and then the two
of them are really good at you know, I always say that, like
Brian is the one who's just like, oh, yeah, you can definitely
make this happen. This is how you do it. And then I had
another My friend Ken is always sort of like the antagonist or pessimist if you
will, still wanting you to do it, but he always will introduce you
to the challenges, and every challenge that he said I was going to have,
I basically have had. So I'm super grateful to him for that because
it was almost like I was prepared in advanced but after talking to those guys,
I had a better idea of sort of like what steps I needed to
take, and there were a lot. It was a lot of work,
but I think the action steps were, you know, number one, you're
going to have to figure out how to get the product. And so the
first thing I did was building my list, which is what I learned in
my career and my PR career is like I built my list and it took
me about three months to build my list, so that when I launched it,
I knew which direction I was going to go in. After that,
I worked the logo a bunch of different times, after three different graphic designers,
I finally settled on what I liked. I took that and I found
somebody that can make boxes, and that took a little bit of time,
and I got the numbers, you know, so I figured out how much
I was going to need, so it was like, how much is it
going to cost to get the boxes? Still, I once I had my
list together, and then I think after that it was just figuring out that
sort of like logistical piece, which, funny enough, I told you Ken
and Brian, those two best friends, Ken being my best friend. Brian
has since become a really good friend of mine. They went to West Point
and then they introduced me to another one of their West Point classmates who owned
a sort of like logistics fulfilling company, and he just basically I went in
for a meeting with him for advice, and he basically took me on no
credit, no money upfront, So everything kind of just like lined up.
But those were those like action steps to getting it from an idea out into
the universe, and then the rest of it. I pretty much learned along
the way, I think we grew like nine It was something crazy like it
was like seven hundred or nine hundred percent or something wicket like that. The
first year, like we went from zero to one hundred, literally, And
so my growth process was we started out with like two hundred something, and
I think the next month we went to like five hundred, and then I
think the next month we went to like a thousand, and from there we
just kept ticking up and ticking up and picking up, and we got to
a point where, you know, I felt like I needed to give the
industry some time to catch up, and some days I still feel like that,
Like the black beauty industry has come a long way in the past seven
years, but still has some growing to do. I think a lot there
are a lot more companies catering to us, making things nicer for us,
more beautiful, more interesting. But I grew very quickly, which led to
a lot of I guess, emotional stress, if you will. I wasn't
prepared to I think I was mentally prepared to do the work, which I
always did and have been, but I was not mentally prepared for success at
all. I wasn't prepared for the kind of success that I got and so
quickly, so I think for my entire life, I just wanted to win.
I wanted to you know. I was taking my jaghammer across that brick
and it finally exploded, and it literally exploded in my face. And so,
yes, it was this sort of wild and amazing almost instantaneous success.
But on the downside of it, I guess the stuff that I wasn't prepared
for is that I was prepared for people's reactions towards me. That part was
hard. It's like that fine print of success is that you're not really you
just don't know how other people are going to take the success around you,
and so some people get really jealous. And I don't care how strong people
think they are. It's really hard sometimes for let's just say a friend or
a family member who, let's just say they have been working harder than you
over the years, or you know, maybe they've struggled more than you have,
and then you just come along and you have this idea that hits,
or maybe they have better ideas over the years, but the stars just didn't
line up for them, and so it's really hard to sort of to handle
that there's also a level of guilt that I had. You know, I
didn't feel like I didn't feel like I deserved all of this success, you
know. It was just it seemed like I've had tons of ideas over the
years. I've succeeded in a lot of ways, but the rewards around this
particular idea were tremendous in a way that I felt guilty about. I think
a lot of times we think that money, you know, success, access
accolades will make us happy, and that is absolutely not what it did.
I feel like, more than anything, I guess, I really feel like
it just highlighted my unhappiness. Like it that success sort of everything got big
at that time, and it's like even the bad stuff got big too,
And so I definitely I would say things exploded for me at the top of
maybe twenty twelve. And by August of that year, I was sitting on
the couch in therapy after having had a breakdown on the floor in New York.
And a part of that breakdown was the race. Like the race that
I was running to keep this business going was hard, but it was not
something that I was dropping out of, and it wasn't even something that I
wanted to quit, but it was definitely heavy and exhausting. It it was
not just daily, it was it was by the second, you know.
I had every email, every phone called, every text message, every Instagram
message, every customer service email. It was all consuming and I really didn't
know how to claw myself out of that. It took me years to find
myself inside out of my business, like my identity had become that to the
point that I lost myself as an individual. It was wild. Something I
would not trade for the world, but something that I don't really think people
understand, and I don't even know that you can prepare for it, but
it is hard. My least favorite day to day thing to do in business
is I do not like managing people. I don't like it at all.
I realize that I am not a good manager, if you will, I
think that I am a great leader, and a lot of times being a
leader is more about sort of leading by example and making sure that I'm doing
the work and I have the ideas and im and I'm often putting certain things
last. But I don't enjoy the sort of like day to day minutia of
managing if people are doing what they're supposed to be doing. I do not
enjoy that at all. The greatest leadership lesson that I have learned since I've
been doing this has been to never panic, regardless of anything that is going
on. You know, sometimes it is not uncommon for let's just say something
happened and one of my teammates might be freaking out. I always stay calm.
You know. Even this weekend, I was doing my life podcast and
the guest isn't answering their phone off an hour before doors open, hasn't answered
it all day, and everyone's kind of like forging out, like, oh
my god, what are we gonna do? And I was like, I
am the queen of the plot twist. I that this, and that has
always been my way as a leader, is that I think that nobody wants
to see the leader panic at all. You know, it's like he calm
and carry on, And that is what. I don't think they've ever seen
me sweat. Most useful piece of advice that I've received in my career came
from Matt Lebove when I worked at BWR. He told me to have a
niche. He was like, how you should drill down on something and you
should specialize in something, and he would never forgot when he said to me,
he was like, if like if black women, if that's your thing,
don't be afraid for that to be your thing. And this is a
person who is a well known publicist strictly to comedians, and so that was
just his thing. It's like, don't be afraid to pick one thing to
focus on and so get a Niche that was the best advice I think I've
gotten. I didn't start my company with funding because I really didn't even know
how to get it. To be honest, I don't think that. You
know, now, I know people who could probably connect me with people to
get funding, but at the time, I wasn't even plugged into the people
who could get funding, and so I was totally fine with that. I
just I've told this story before, but I don't know how many times I've
ever told on a podcast. But when I was twenty five years old,
my godparents left me money, and not a lot, but the money was
to be divvied up to me over ten years, and so every January,
I know, I would know that I'm getting like a little small lump sum
of money. So I kind of just banked on that. So that's why
my business launched in January, because that's when I knew my check would be
coming. And so when it came time for like the largest expense of the
company, I just used that check to start it and the rest is history.
So I guess in some ways I did have some funding, if you
will, and it kind of I always think about my guyparents, who whom
I love dearly, and I bet you they probably wouldn't expect for me to
have taken the money that they gave me. And like, I mean,
I have more than like a hundred times over, maybe not a hundred,
maybe like maybe like fifty times over. I have made that money back.
So I guess I got some family funding, which is why it's really important
to me to save from my child so that he has something to start a
business or whatever he wants to do when he becomes a young adult. People
might take this the wrong way. I think it's not a badge of honor,
you know, I think that you don't. You haven't gained my respect
until you've actually earned money, until you've made some money. So there are
people who have gotten funded who are making money, But there are people out
there who have gotten funded ended up being a bust and still running around talking
about there's some kind of boss if you will, and so I think that,
you know, there are times I had somebody who gave me a really
positive analysis about funding, because I've always kind of been on the fence about
it, and she essentially said, Okay, now that you have your business
one hundred percent, so we'll just use one million dollars as just an easy
math problem. So if your business is making one million dollars, all one
million dollars is yours. But if you take funding and your business becomes an
eight million dollar business, and let's just say you get half of it,
now you're making four million dollars, which is a far more money than you
would have made on your own. And I'm like, this is absolutely true.
However, there's a lot of stuff that you are going to give up
for that four million dollars, and it may not you know, It's like,
do you want to make four million dollars for two years or do you
want to make one million dollars for the next twenty years. I got to
where I am today by being incredibly disciplined in my life as it pertains to
my works. My superpower is time. I don't think that anybody knows how
to take advantage of time better than I do, and it is such an
exact and fine science for me. And I am very strict about how I
allow others to use my time, especially during the week. So the way
that I structure my weeks days, how I use the time, nobody can
beat me at that. Building a company brand is one thing, but increasingly
it's more important now than ever to also simultaneously built a personal brand because people
don't just buy into companies, they buy into stories, So creating a narrative
with your brand is all the more important. And we want to hear from
my league how she seamlessly did both. If I had a young protege or
a mentee, I would tell them that my personal brand is what people say
about me when I'm not around, you know, And what that usually would
be is like, she's a beast, she's hard working, she's disciplined,
she's going to get it done. If you want somebody who's going to be
there and show up on time, and you're gonna pretty much have to drag
off the field, this is the girl. She is incredibly resourceful. That
is. I always wanted to bring that to the table with people of like,
I know that if I'm in a situation and it's looking like it might
go left, I'm going to figure it out. And so I focused on
that before I tried to jump out with pictures on Instagram. It's why whenever
I run into sort of like a social issue or a tift on social media,
it's why it doesn't have an impact on my business because my personal brand
is not you know, my quotes or my pictures. It is what people
know to be true about me. I experience imposter syndrome probably all the time.
I've gotten a lot better, I will say, but like I have,
I have stood on the outside of my life for many years just like
WTF, Like is this? Did I really do this? You know?
Do I really belong here? You know? And even feeling that way about
the rewards, like why me it? You know, even though it's so
crazy. It's like I bought a house in my neighborhood, and I'll like
I'll be like walking in my neighborhood with a key to my house, feeling
like it's like walking past the neighbor is like like I'm breaking in It's crazy,
but because it just just like I don't belong here, you know.
And so it is a constant working process, especially as I go to newer
heights and newer levels. It is definitely a working progress, but I plow
through it. I have sacrifice a lot to get to this point in my
life. I sacrificed probably a lot of fun in some ways. And you
know, in my early twenties, I sacrificed. But to me, it
doesn't really feel like that, you know. I think that the things that
other people would, you know, see is as missing out. It felt
like a positive putting in of time. But you know, I've sacrificed.
I've missed weddings, I've missed birthdays for a couple of reasons. I missed
out on a lot of things because I didn't have the time and or in
my kind of like dropping down as low as I could to try to get
my business off the ground, I couldn't afford to do a lot of things
with people, you know. So I missed out on a lot of things
that my friends were doing when I was in like Ultra grimo, and and
I still miss out. I'm at a point in my life where people don't
even call me and invite me to stuff because they know I'm not coming.
So I'm still inside of the sacrifice, you know. And sometimes it'll hurt
because I'll see people. I'll see people getting together on social and I'm like,
oh, they went to a Halloween party, but they knew that if
they asked me, I was gonna say no. So it's just, you
know, it's it's what this life comes with. I've had many times in
my business where you know, I've had some some big idea that I just
knew people would respond to, and you know, I'll look up and we
will have sold, you know, say my goal was like a thousand that
I wanted to sell and will sell like, you know, fifty, and
it's just like, oh, that was a bust, you know. But
I don't let that stuff get me down. I have a TED talk that
I did that I just I was trying to freeze my eggs at the time,
so I was like doing IVF and then the ladies who invited me to
do it, they wanted me to speak about something that I really didn't want
to talk about, So they wanted me to do a TED talk on like
the hair business, which I really don't like to do because it's like I
didn't want to sort of out the business or anything like that. And so
when I tell you that that was a total bust, that was like the
worst thing that I have probably ever done professionally. What really excites me about
what I'm doing professionally in terms of CurlBOX my business is how fired up it
seems like people are about marketing to us, even though you know, people
want us to spend our money. I feel like for so long the industry
didn't really have to work that hard for it. You know, they just
never change fonts stuff. There were things that sat on the shelves for decades.
And now you can't go into a store, you know, two weeks
apart and not then there not be something new to help you or or to
try. And that really just blows my mind and excites me and makes me
happy that black women can now go into a CVS. Like there was a
time where you would never go into CVS for anything as it pertains to your
hair or anything like that, and now you can do that, you can
go into the grocery store. That excites me. I think if I was
going to say, maybe what alarms me is what made our industry or even
I think this can apply to a lot of different industries. So exciting was
this sort of authenticity, this like rawness. And I think that, you
know, as smaller companies become bigger companies, where do we get that that
rawness from? And so that would be something that I would be like,
you know, but maybe that's just a breeding ground for more people to come
through and do it again. My whole sort of like my world is centered
around like making everything easier, quicker, faster, smoother, And so one
thing that I'll do is how I do my whole calendar system. And so
that is something that I really love. The fantastical app I think I've told
people about that. It's like thirty bucks. It's a little pricy, but
very much worth it to me if you are a person who really has to
like try to get a lot done with your day. I use this conference
call line when I'm doing my call is called uber Conference. And what I
love about Uber Conference is that when we're talking about these time hacks, is
that it will send you a text message when the first person has gotten on
the line. So before I would be like, oh, it's one o'clock,
let me call in, and then ding dong ding dong, ding dong
ding, and nobody is showing up. And so this allows me to just
keep going and then once somebody so if somebody's late, it's like, it's
cool, I'll just keep moving. And once I see that somebody's on the
line, then I get on the line. So there are a lot of
like middle things that I do, I feel that allow me to keep it
moving. And you know, I try to use as many resources as I
can and making sure that I can spend My goal is to try to be
able to spend as much time as I possibly can working, which some people
probably think it's crazy, but it's like, you know what, I can't
do laundry because I'm working, so I outsource that I cannot do all the
grocery shopping. So I'm instacrating because I need to work. And so that
is how I make it so that my days are night bogged down with the
day to day stuff that we all have to do. Success means for me,
you know, I have felt successful for a long time, which tends
to surprise people. But I felt successful when I was doing something that I
really love to do. I would say that I have loved every job that
I've had. After graduating college and probably leading up to once, I kind
of made it my mind about what I wanted to do. And so even
if I maybe didn't care for the environment, or maybe it was hard and
maybe I wanted to leave, I definitely have always picked out and sought things
that that sort of made me happy. And I feel like that is success
when you're doing some when you're able to work on things that bring you joy.
I'm Ayana Angel, and thank you for listening to Amelie. Produced by
Mazie Media. This episode concludes season one of the Ameli podcasts, but we
will be back for more with another season of insights and stories from dynamic,
trailblazing businesswomen. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out when the new
season starts, and in the meantime, you can follow at Mazie Media on
Instagram. If you're eager for more goodness right now, you can also tune
into the Switch, Pivot or Quit podcast, also produced by Amzie Media,
for equally compelling interviews and topics concerning personal and professional development. Just search Switch,
Pivot or Quit wherever you listen to podcasts. See you next season.