Sephora Accelerate Brand Soft Rows Wants To Fill Gaps In The Prestige Textured Haircare Market

Prior to applying to Sephora’s Accelerate program, Soft Rows founder Quani Burnett visited 30 beauty retailers in California and the Midwest, where she asked store staff to recommend products for her natural hair. They overwhelmingly suggested shampoo or treatment products.

To Burnett, their recommendations were a glaring reminder that there remain gaps in the textured haircare assortment at prestige retail. “There are a lot of brands that fulfill that pre-wash and wash space, but I didn’t really feel like there were many options when it came to high-performing stylers,” she says, adding, “When a Black woman walks into Sephora, she’s going to buy all of the Black-owned skincare and body brands and then, when she gets to the hair aisle, she’s probably going to go to the beauty supply store because she knows that those products are going to work on her hair.”

Burnett is on a mission to change that with her forthcoming brand Soft Rows. The brand, a member of Sephora Accelerate’s 2024 cohort, is slated to debut later this year with a kit featuring a treatment mask and two styling products to help customers maintain their hair between wash days and provide versatility for heat-styled, natural and protective styles. Burnett believes the kit format will facilitate trialing of Soft Rows’ complete inaugural assortment and allow it to collect feedback to inform future products.

Burnett recruited cosmetic chemist and Sula Labs founder AJ Addae to develop Soft Rows’ proprietary formulas. “The textured hair aisles have long been filled with heavy oils and butters, and I knew I wanted to reimagine cultural hair staples with cleaner/better for you, high performing ingredients for today’s multi-cultural consumer,” she says. “We exist at the intersection of science and salons.”

Burnett has made sure to invest in inclusive product testing that didn’t skip tightly curled hair. “Oftentimes, when you’re seeing a product that says for curly hair or has been tested on curly hair, what we know is that that is typically a looser curl pattern,” says Burnett. “It was really important that, as we’re testing, we’re working with women of color who have tightly textured hair so you can assure that, at almost every touchpoint of the brand, it’s going to be able to work across all textures.”

Before Soft Rows dives into haircare products, it plans to release Soft Rows merch. Already, Burnett details consumers have been requesting pillowcases, bonnets, posters and more. She says, “The really cool thing about being a pre-launch brand and Accelerate is that we really get to take this time to really listen to our community and build that momentum, but also create that loyalty through things that they specifically are asking for.”

“The textured hair aisles have long been filled with heavy oils and butters, and I knew I wanted to reimagine cultural hair staples.”

She’s begun building Soft Rows’ community on social media and through an editorial destination on its website called Crown Talks. Its stories cover topics such as being a South Asian curly haired person and how attending an HBCU has impacted one writer’s perceptions of beauty. Burnett says, “Outside of product, we really want to be this destination where people can come and not only hear stories from across different cultures, but really get sound and practical education as it relates to their hair and their unique concerns.”

Vintage hair ads that Burnett describes as portraying the glamour of Black women and Black salon culture have served as visual inspirations for Soft Rows. “Back in my day, the salon was a safe space, and it was a place where you would get dropped off as a child and you’d spend all day there,” says Burnett. “I learned so much about womanhood, and I learned about how Black women interacted with one another and how our hair was really a way to express ourselves.”

Burnett explains that the “rows” in Soft Rows refers to cornrows, and “soft” refers to a soft life or lifestyle of comfort, a notion popularized by TikTok. She says, “I wanted something for the brand that, at first glance, you probably wouldn’t know what it meant, but, as we continue to tell our story, we really want to delve into not only the word soft, but also the ancestral and cultural connections to cornrows.” On the usage of soft, she says, “As Black women, we don’t always get the chance to be soft in this world. We don’t always get the chance to be soft with ourselves.”

Prior to focusing on Soft Rows, Burnett spent over five years helping other brands become more inclusive. She started an Instagram account called Drunk Elephant Brown in 2018 in response to seeing few people of color on the skincare brand’s social media feed. Drunk Elephant Brown evolved into Beauty4BrownSkin, which catapulted Burnett into consulting for brands like Briogeo, Kosas, Paula’s Choice and Youth to the People, where she eventually went to work full-time in the marketing department.

Burnett says, “Working for Youth To The People I saw firsthand how Sephora can really incubate a brand.” Speaking about participating in Sephora’s Accelerate program, she elaborates, “Brands that have come through this program undoubtedly have some sort of edge that I think stays with them and so I think, for me, that’s really what I hoped to gain, and it is what I’m gaining.”

Burnett has written about the intersection between beauty, Blackness and culture, too, for publications like Byrdie, Essence and Refinery29. She says, “I have this untraditional background into beauty, but I think all of those different touchpoints led me to really identifying gaps in the market.”