Grace Eleyae Has Sold Over $18M Worth Of Hair Protection Headwear—And It’s Due To Sell A Lot More With A Launch At Ulta Beauty

There’s nothing like a hair catastrophe to spring a woman into action. During a vacation to Kenya in January 2013, the straightened, chemically-treated hair on the back Grace Eleyae’s head broke off after it had been rubbing a headrest for eight hours during a jarring car ride in the dry heat. “I had an inch-and-a-half diameter hole in breakage,” she says. “If I had something that was stylish, I would have worn it on the road trip, and I might have been able to prevent that breakage.”

After returning home to the United States, Chino, Calif., native Eleyae determined she’d create the stylish headwear she was missing on her trip.  She checked out the skull caps and beanies people were sporting on the street for inspiration. “I was giving people weird stares because I was studying the construction,” recounts Eleyae. She wanted to use satin inside her cap to help hair retain moisture, a particularly important function for curly hair that easily loses moisture, and reduce tangles, but she couldn’t quite figure out how the satin-filled cap would stay on.

“In February 2014, I finally made the original prototype with an elastic band. It looked like a skull cap, and the lining had no stretch in it. I made it so big that there were many gathers around the edges, but I was still super excited about it. Now, it has more slouch, and it looks more like a beanie than a skull cap,” says Eleyae. “I was making a product to solve my problem, but my mom said, ‘I think it could be a business.’ That’s where it all started.”

Grace Eleyae
In the spring of next year, Grace Eleyae will launch in the curly hair section at Ulta Beauty with six stockkeeping units, including its signature slaps, a turban style and a headband.

A month later, Eleyae put slaps or satin-lined caps that she’d painstakingly sewn for over 90 minutes each on Etsy. Three to five of them would sell daily in the beginning. As spring turned into summer, she decided to get serious about the business, conducted a photo shoot and agreed to a production run of 1,000 units. She sent caps to 100 YouTubers in an effort to educate consumers about slaps and received three responses. Two responses were dismissive and a third, from Kassima Isabelle, a Canadian vlogger better known as CloudyApples, was a maybe. Isabelle ultimately mentioned Eleyae’s slap in a video as a must-have in her routine, and orders shot up to 25 to 100 daily.

Since then, Eleyae’s bootstrapped brand, which was called Satin Lined Caps before being eponymously renamed, has attracted around 200,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram, amassed roughly 350,000 customers, sold 750,000-plus products and generated $18 million in revenue. Its fans are so passionate that they schooled Sarah Marantz Lindenberg, founder of NiteCap, about its slaps when she appeared to claim ownership of silk caps in a magazine interview. Around 90% of Grace Eleyae’s sales come from its website and 10% via Amazon, but the brand is making a major push into retail by entering Ulta Beauty in the spring of next year.

“I was making a product to solve my problem, but my mom said, ‘I think it could be a business.’ That’s where it all started.”

“We’ve reached so many customers through e-commerce on our website and Amazon, but there are still people who haven’t heard of us who might go into an Ulta and discover us there. There’s still huge market share to be gained,” says Eleyae, adding, “To me, this feels like a new chapter in our book. We’ve done the e-commerce thing. We’ve grown through influencers, and we’ve scaled through Facebook advertising. This new chapter is bringing us to the mass market, and it’s exciting.”

Pitching retailers hasn’t always been a cinch for Eleyae. She’s encountered buyers that don’t grasp the textured hair category and aren’t sure if there’s demand for hair protection headwear. However, in the last year, Eleyae has detected a significant change in retailer receptivity, both due to a rise in recognition of her brand—it doesn’t hurt that celebrities such as Gabrielle Union and Viola Davis have donned slaps—and expansions of curly hair sections inside stores. Grace Eleyae will be located in the curly hair section at Ulta with six stockkeeping units, including its signature slaps, a turban style and a headband.

Grace Eleyae
In spring of next year, Grace Eleyae will launch in the curly hair section at Ulta Beauty with six stockkeeping units, including its signature slaps, a turban style and a headband.

For retailers that remain on the fence, Eleyae clues them in on the spending power of textured hair consumers. Some 65% of Americans have curly, coily or wavy hair. “Textured hair spans multiple races, but just black women alone will have a buying power of more than $1.5 trillion within the next two years,” she details. “Not only is the textured hair market already a multibillion-dollar market, it’s also growing. This is the perfect time to get it into your stores.”

There’s a lot of room for Grace Eleyae to make headway (pun intended) in U.S. retailers, and Eleyae plans to extend her brand abroad, too. The United Kingdom, France and Canada are high on her list of countries to target for retail. She dreams of physical distribution in African countries as well. A first-generation American, Eleyae’s mother is from Kenya, and her father is from Nigeria. “We have customers from Kenya to Senegal order slaps, and it will take 30 days to get there,” she says. “We want to make sure we are successful in huge markets where it’s not as accessible as it could be.”

“We’ve done the e-commerce thing. We’ve grown through influencers, and we’ve scaled through Facebook advertising. This new chapter is bringing us to the mass market, and it’s exciting.”

As Grace Eleyae stretches into stores, Eleyae is busy enlarging its assortment. The brand has gone from five slap varieties to 175 SKUs priced primarily from $6.99 to $77 in 15 main product types. Its selection contains baseball caps, straw hats, fedoras and pillowcases, for example, and Grace Eleyae has tiptoed into haircare and skincare with the products Rhassoul Clay, Rose Water and Argan Oil. On tap for 2020 is deeper dive into haircare.

“My haircare journey has been one with many ups and downs. I used to say my hair is 4Z. I didn’t have a curl pattern, and the only way to get definition was to manipulate it with twists or braids. Two years ago, I discovered a process and honed it. I can wear my hair natural, and it’s completely defined,” says Eleyae. “I want to be able to offer that and be able to offer it in less than an hour from start to finish from detangled to curled.”

Grace Eleyae
Grace Eleyae’s assortment has gone from five slap varieties to 175 SKUs priced primarily from $6.99 to $77 in 15 main product types. It has baseball caps, straw hats, fedoras and pillowcases, for example, and has tiptoed into haircare and skincare.

Grace Eleyae’s goal is to become a part of its customers’ lives throughout the day. “We like to have you covered from your morning routine to your nighttime routine, and everywhere in between,” says Eleyae. “We have warm slaps that are wool. Many people use them in cold climates to keep warm, but they’re also worn at night to protect the hair. You can keep them on when you get up in the morning, add some hoops and walk out the door. There are so many different uses for a slap.”