Your Fave Product May Have Become Mediocre to Attract A “More Diverse” Audience

(This is my content from my website at curlytea.com)

Many natural hair beauties have noticed a problem concerning the quality and effectiveness of haircare product(s) from brands they used to adore.

I was watching a youtube video from “Kaice Alea” responding to twitter comments posted by a young lady who was asked to be a hair model at an expo featuring Carol’s Daughter products. The hair model at the expo was apparently shocked by the lack of diversity she saw. (Watch the video for screenshots of her twitter posts and pics of the expo)

At the expo, the hair model supposedly saw a “multicultural booth” were all the ad posters featured white or very light skinned women, and most of the representatives were white.

This is why it’s important to know who’s behind the products you’re buying and who’s making the decision on how they are marketed to the public. It also crucial to note how the formulas for those products are changing and why.

Let’s start with the truth: Many people who didn’t give a d@mn about black curly hair 10-15 years ago have either released their “me too” product line or are buying up popular (previously) black-owned companies to tap into those dollars.

Their objective is the bottom line. Period. And if they can save 3 cents a bottle by switching to a slightly more questionable lineup of ingredients, they will. If the teams of marketers think they can make 3 more cents a bottle by altering the formulas to cater to a “more diverse” clientele, they will.

As I was finishing up this post, Shea Moisture started trending on twitter concerning their use of white models to advertise their products. Some people’s knee-jerk reaction was to downplay the criticism being leveled against Shea Moisture by the very same black women who helped make Shea Moisture the powerhouse it is today was.

The problem with Shea Moisture is not simply an ad, like the proclamations from many know-nothing short-sighted people on social media claim. The problem is that black women have been complaining for years about the decreasing effectiveness of Shea Moisture products.

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If you love Shea Moisture and certain products continue to work well for you, by all means continue to use them if you want.

As for me, I only started to see the writing on the wall about 2 years ago. I noticed a change with the Coconut and Hibiscus Co-Wash Conditioning Cleanser. I used to love that product years ago. But last year (maybe more like 2 years ago, actually) I bought 2 more bottles because I couldn’t #DIY anything that worked as well as that cleanser used to. It was trash. It was nowhere near as effective as it used to be. It felt gummy and didn’t clean anywhere near as well as it used to clean.

Luckily, I’d save a photo of the ingredients from when I got my 1st bottle. Exactly as suspected, the ingredients list had changed. Later I found out the company who owns Shea Moisture, Sundial Brands, had taken on an “investment” from Bain Capital. Mitt Romney’s old stomping ground owns/owned an allegedly “large stake” in Shea Moisture. I tossed the bottles and moved on to something else.

That’s how it sometimes starts for companies who don’t outright sell to larger multinational corporations. Slowly, businesses which cater to a niche demographic — like naturally curly haired black women — become a target for takeover.

In my opinion, sometimes investments are made for the main purpose of the larger company learning everything about the smaller company and it’s demographic: how the brand is marketed, what ingredients are used for their products, how the product is used by the main demographic, who their suppliers are, etc. In the system of Capitalism, this is a feature, not a bug.

Suddenly, because the black-owned company has taken “investment” money, the creeps now have a say in how that company focuses on the bottom line. If the new investors or new owners say to change the formula to make it cheaper to produce, you HAVE to change the formula. If they say to change the formula so it works better for the hair type to which they want to market, you HAVE to change the formula.

Formulas will be changed because they now have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders/investors. If the shareholders can save 20 cents a bottle by switching to a less effective and cheaper conditioning ingredient, they’ll do it 99.9% of the time.

Larger company would prefer to take over ownership of their competitors. However, I don’t think the larger companies are above using everything they’ve learned to set up competing brands which they own outright. Some of these larger companies may buy the suppliers of competitors which they couldn’t takeover, or put a hand full of mediocre clones on the market to shrink a competitor’s market share.

<< Get it Hot Then Take It “Mainstream”? >>

These people are money driven. If black women hadn’t shown them the enormous profit in (pretending?) to cater to natural hair customers, I believe they wouldn’t care at all about the black haircare market.

I think some companies use the black community to “design in” certain products. The term “design in” is used by salons (and beauty schools) where a manufacturer will have the stylists (future stylists) use a product on their clients in the salon (or at the school). If the product works well, the salons will sell bottles of the product directly to clients. After the product gets really popular, the manufacturers move the product to the grocery, pharmacy and big box stores.

But for this analogy, when I say “design in” I’m speaking about how manufacturers slap a photo of a naturally curly woman on the bottle, add a few drops of “key ingredients” we are more likely to respond to — like Shea butter, Black Castor oil or Baobab oil — and see how many black people buy it. They use black women to ‘make it hot’, so to speak. The product becomes worthy of coveting if it finds its way to the Hot Lists of magazines or becomes the topic of hundreds/thousands of reviews on youtube.

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