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“the amount of women that come in with a picture of you pulled out
of a magazine saying they want your hair. If you had hair products,
you would be a millionaire.’ ”
Hmm, she thought, walking out, could I make hair products?
That’s so interesting. Hair might seem like a shallow or purely aes-
thetic subject, but for black and brown women who wear their hair
natural to express their authentic selves, it is a political statement.
Ross could talk for days about the connection between her own hair
and self-acceptance. But the notion that there was a business oppor-
tunity around helping all the other women struggling like her—that
never occurred to her until that man dropped the idea.
She started thinking about the marketplace. Only a few prod-
ucts existed for black women’s natural hair, and they didn’t work
for her. There was a void, and a customer base that needed no con-
vincing. “We’re going to keep show-
ering— I mean, I hope so,” she says.
“We could probably stand to use
less water—no, not probably, abso-
lutely—but washing your hair is not
going anywhere. And you don’t need
to do a con job [on customers]:
‘You’re so ugly, you need this.’ Like,
no! ‘You’re gorgeous. Do you want
stuff to support your gorgeousness?’
That’s it to me.”
Her company of hair products
flashed before her.
ONCE GIRLFRIENDS FINISHED in 2008,
Ross sat at her computer and wrote a
hair care brand pitch for curly, coily,
and tight-textured hair. The vision
was twofold: The company would
create great products for this commu-
nity “but also flip on its head the way
we are seen and marketed to, so it’s
not based on a beauty industry that
just doesn’t see us,” she says. “I say
‘the beauty industry,’ but honestly, it’s
the world.”
Being willing to define not only a
new role for herself but the vision she
could bring to the world is the kind
of pivotal moment that makes an entrepreneur. But if she now saw
herself as a brand builder, the people around her didn’t get it. “Why
would anybody want hair products from you? You’re an actress,”
someone at an agency she worked with said. Another suggested she
make wigs. A third said to just do a hair TV show.
Ross didn’t want to pretzel herself into someone else’s idea and
pressed forward with her own. She tried to launch her line with two
large beauty companies (which she won’t name), but neither worked
out. When JCPenney approached her about a limited edition fash-
ion line, as much as she’d love to design clothes, she thought no; it
would just be a distraction from her hair care mission. “And then I
was like, “Hold on, everybody. Hold on, team. Hold on!” she says.
“First of all, how much money can I get and how can that fund the
hair company? And then, there were so many extremely important
opportunities for growth and to learn how I, my brand, whatever
you want to call it, translates monetarily, what works, what goes into
articulating my taste, point of view, vision into an actual thing.”
So she went for it.
At the same time Ross worked on developing the collection, she
was also starting to explore her personal narrative in a new way:
What exactly was she to people? Who did she want to be? Circling
those questions was deeply personal, but defining the answers is
something every entrepreneur must do for herself. Ross had always
seen herself as part of the larger history of black culture: “Our con-
tribution and our ownership over what we create has become invis-
ible because of the way the story is told,” she says. So it was time to
start telling hers—honestly and, just as important, unapologetically.
She picked her moments. She gave a speech at a Glamour
Women of the Year Summit in 2017, which she called “My Life Is
Mine.” Why should she apologize for being single and childless at
45, she asked? And several months later, she started working on
a talk, which she’d give at TED in 2018, called “A Woman’s Fury
Holds Lifetimes of Wisdom.” “That
fury,” she said, “sits deep inside us
as we practice our smiles and try to
be pleasant.” She spoke the words
that women thought but didn’t say,
which is why the videos just added
to the millions of followers she’d
been gathering on Instagram. Ross
was becoming their voice.
And voice is indeed monetizable.
“As somebody who comes from
the brand space,” says Rachel Jonas
Gilman, who worked for Juicy
Couture, Cole Haan, and Jonathan
Adler, and would go on to become
managing director of Pattern, “what
gets you excited is when somebody
is truly authentic. And that’s Tracee.
It’s super rare. But it’s extremely
important in this day and age, when
there’s a lot of different brands and
noise in the marketplace.”
Now it was time for Ross to
become louder.THE JCPENNEY COLLECTION did well,
and Ross put the licensing fee she’d
gotten into her nascent hair care
brand. She hired a seasoned beauty
industry expert, who didn’t pan out and was pretty disappointing. But
in a way, Ross didn’t need her, having learned so many lessons her-
self about retail from doing the fashion line—the detail that goes into
a hangtag, how photographer deals must include a budget for retouch-
ing, the importance of maintaining creative control (a big one), and,
she says, “the shelves!” She needed to line up some shelves.
As Ross continued the push for her company based on sheer con-
viction, unlike just a few years ago, she now had a voice, a perspec-
tive, and some industry savvy. She approached Ulta Beauty about a
retail deal, and this time someone got it. “What instantly struck me
about Tracee was her passionate advocacy for inclusivity that comes
through in everything she does,” says CEO Mary Dillon. Dave Kim-
bell, Ulta’s president, was in that meeting, too. Her celebrity was
certainly a plus, he says, “but what’s unique about Tracee is [her]
personal passion and authenticity”—that golden word again—
“because she came at it from a place of sharing her own story, and
she has a remarkable ability to connect with people. We were confi-
dent from day one that she would be successful.”