Indie Haircare Brand Bounce Curl Has Spent Over $500K Fighting 130,000 Copycats Of Its Viral Brush

Founder Merian Odesho isn’t timid about protecting Bounce Curl’s intellectual property.

Since it released the viral Define EdgeLift Brush in 2023, she’s fought to have links to more than 130,000 copycats removed and brought thousands of companies to court. She estimates Bounce Curl has spent over $500,000 in legal fees to combat imitators, and lost anywhere from $2 million to $3 million in potential sales to them. It has a brand protection team consisting of legal partners, three monitoring platforms and two dedicated employees.

“You don’t think about dupes until you’re getting duped as a creator,” she says. “It’s kind of like whack-a-mole. You find one, you take it down, and then 10 more appear the same day.”

Bounce Curl has taken to social media—it has over 240,000 followers on TikTok and nearly 850,000 on Instagram—to warn its fans of copycats and remind them it’s the inventor of the Define EdgeLift Brush, which it retails for $26.99. In a June 5 post, the brand wrote, “We’ve seen counterfeit brushes popping up, and we want to assure you that these poor-quality, chemical-infested imitations are not from us. Please be careful!”

Odesho says, “I worry about, OK, are these dupes going to dilute the market where one day I’m not going to have funds to save for my kids’ college? I tell my story to my followers, and I really help them feel the emotions that I feel, and I think that that’s really been helpful in our situation because now we’re starting to get some really amazing collaborations that I never ever would’ve dreamed of.”

When the copycats began popping up more than a year ago, Odesho had just given birth to her second son and admits her emotions were all over the place. She’s calmed down a bit today. “There was a point where I had to go to urgent care because I literally thought I was going to have a heart attack,” she says. “I feel a lot better now. I’m not letting the dupe culture ruin my life.”

@bouncecurl

📣 Please share & show love to the original inventors! 🙏 Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. These brushes & our brand are a true labor of love 💛✨ Every detail of #BounceCurl is created with care, passion, and purpose. We pour our heart ❤️ and time ⏳ into everything we do. With love, The BounceCurl Team 💫💁‍♀️ #curlyhairbrush 💕 #definebrush 🔥 #defineedgeliftbrush 💫 #bouncecurlbrush 💛 #coilyhair 🌀 #wavyhair 🌊 #curls 💁🏽‍♀️ #curlyfamily 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦 #bestcurlybrush 🏆 #volumeedgelift #volume #patent @The Curly Family

♬ original sound – BounceCurl

Designed with a handle that doubles as a parting tool for precision parting, ridges along the sides of the brush head for curl separation and flexible custom boar bristles to create smooth, medium-sized curls, Odesho patented Define EdgeLift Brush in the United States months after its release. She shares the cost of the patenting process can easily exceed $30,000. The brush is patented outside the U.S., too, in jurisdictions such as Australia, the European Union and more, hiking up the patent fees.

Odesho has discovered the majority of Define EdgeLift Brush copycats originate in China. She says, “They’re coming in and taking your IP and just selling it, and then they’re also beating you with the price.”

Lately, though, Odesho has run across bigger companies with brushes mimicking Define EdgeLift Brush. She declined to disclose the names of the companies for legal reasons. Bounce Curl has reached out to various companies with Define EdgeLift Brush replicants, choosing to collaborate with some.

Bounce Curl launched in 2005 with Light Hold Creme Gel, and a year and a half later it expanded to shampoos and moisturizers before introducing creams in 2019, but it’s the brush that really put the brand on the map. It sold out within a week of its launch and has sold out 14 times since. Odesho says, “People just went crazy for it.”

“I’m not letting the dupe culture ruin my life.”

Social media has been instrumental in the success of the brush, and Bounce Curl has sold over 80,000 brushes on TikTok Shop. One of the brand’s pinned TikTok videos showing a hairstylist using the tool on a customer has drawn more than 12 million likes. Bounce Curl seeds monthly packages to influencers. Bounce Curl captures the majority of its content in its Japanese-inspired head spa salon that opened in Phoenix about a year and a half ago.

“I wanted Bounce Curl to be more than just a product line, I wanted it to be a space where people could come to learn how to embrace and style their natural texture,” says Odesho. “Creating a space that helps people feel confident and connected to their hair is incredibly meaningful to me.”

Bounce Curl was selected to be part of Sephora’s 2025 retail readiness Accelerator program along with the brands 4AM Skin, OliviaUmma, The Potion Studio, Tonal Cosmetics, Influxious, Ruhveda and The Steam Bar. The program helped direct a rebrand for Bounce Curl that will be revealed later this year with a focus on science, proprietary ingredients and Odesho’s Mesopotamian heritage.

Retail is on the docket next year for Bounce Curl. Odesho fielded retail partnership inquiries for years, but never felt ready until now. She believes a retail presence will be beneficial in reducing the flow of knockoffs by providing consumers with additional trustworthy destinations to access authentic Bounce Curl products.

Prior to retail, Odesho says, “I wanted to grow our internal team and infrastructure first so we wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. We’re a small, family-owned business and building sustainably matters to us.”

While the velocity of Define EdgeLift Brush copycats has decreased with Bounce Curl pursuing them, Odesho doesn’t foresee them ever disappearing entirely. Bounce Curl plans to release five other patented tools in the coming years, and she anticipates knockoffs will pop up for them as well.

“Brushes are relatively easy to copy, even if we include unique internal mechanisms, manufacturers can still dissect and replicate them,” says Odesho. “What we are doing is investing heavily in global legal protection, filing in each market to ensure we can take down counterfeit listings efficiently and enforce our IP.”