Growing up, Joseph Maine took his older brother duties seriously.
He would help his sister Sabrina get ready for school and church, which often involved recreating hairstyles worn by Disney Channel characters. When he wasn’t doing his sister’s hair, he joined her in giving their Barbie dolls haircuts. Needless to say, it wasn’t much of a surprise that the siblings both attended cosmetology school at 16 years old and ended up entering the beauty industry.
Joseph trained under hairstylist Serge Normant, worked with celebrity clients like Ashley Benson and Priyanka Chopra, and collaborated with beauty brands over the past decade, while Sabrina managed a Beverly Hills salon and helped distribute beauty brands along the way. Eager to team up on an endeavor that didn’t involve botching Barbie dolls, the brother-sister pair decided they would combine their experience and skill sets to develop a new brand.
The first area that they noticed could use an upgrade was hair tools. “If I walk down an aisle at Target, it’s the same stuff you’ve seen for the past decade, and there’s nothing really that exciting about any of it,” argues Joseph. “And those brands also lack any cool placement, education or community.” Of the mass-market hair tools, he continues, “I don’t think they really resonate with the modern girl.”
At the other end of the spectrum, there are the technology-forward tools that often come with lofty price tags and confounding instructions. The Maine siblings were interested in hair tools that sit somewhere in between. They had to be affordable, high quality, easy to use and cute. Joseph says, “We weren’t really seeing any great mid-range brands that were like—for lack of a better reference—Zara for haircare.”
After plunking down $10,000 of their own money, Joseph and Sabrina launched Trademark Beauty in 2019 with the three-barrel curling iron Babe Waves and four shades of Extraaa Hair Glitter. Today, the brand has 72 stockkeeping units spanning hair accessories like hair clips and headbands, a bentonite clay face mask and two hair tools: $56 Babe Waves and $49 Easy Blo, a volumizing hair dryer. In addition, the Maines have partnered with Color Wow on styling products. Joseph is the brand’s artistic director.
In 18 months on the market, Trademark Beauty has generated over $1 million in revenues, and Joseph predicts the brand will cross $1.5 million by its second anniversary. Babe Waves has proven to be a big driver for the brand. It’s sold out five times since its launch, including three times in the last six months.
“We weren’t really seeing any great mid-range brands that were like—for lack of a better reference—Zara for haircare.”
The concept for the design was based on tools from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and is a nod to the days the Maine siblings spent discovering beauty tools as kids. Joseph notes that they weren’t looking to reinvent the tools necessarily, but rather improve upon them.
“I found a manufacturer that did triple-barrel irons, and we just started sampling them a bit larger and doing what we needed to do to bring them up to the modern age, by adding a digital dial, extending the cord length, giving it a velvet touch handle, and opening the clamp a little bit so you didn’t get a crease in your hair,” he says. “And those things were relatively simple because we weren’t starting from scratch.”
Joseph figures Babe Waves’ popularity stems from a shift away from perfect curls and toward loose waves, and the fact that people are doing their hair at home now more than ever. The efforts of Trademark Beauty over the past year have been important, too. The Maines have doubled down on brand-building efforts amid the pandemic.
Joseph notes self-funded Trademark Beauty doesn’t have an enormous marketing budget. It’s relied primarily on organic outreach, traditional public relations and content. Recently, the brand has concentrated a lot on TikTok. “I’ve killed myself on Instagram for years and, at best, you get 20,000 views on a video,” says Joseph. “With TikTok, we’re able to create great content and reach 2 million people in one video.”
Harking back to their roots, bite-size videos featuring Joseph styling Sabrina’s hair have been effective. “We’ve tried on our business TikTok to do certain product-focused videos and things that we think are fun, essentially selling product, and none of that has taken off,” he says. “I think, with anything, it’s content first, product and sell last.”
A facet of Trademark Beauty that’s particularly critical to its success so far is keeping prices low. A large portion of the brand’s main customer base is people who’ve never bought hair tools before. They’re often women heading off to college or into the workforce. Trademark Beauty has avoided excessive markups in order to ensure its items are affordable. Since the brand started off in direct-to-consumer distribution, that wasn’t hard to do, but it’s become a challenge as it has extended its distribution outside of DTC with partners like QVC.
“With TikTok, we’re able to create great content and reach 2 million people in one video.”
“Everyone wants the most competitive price that you can give them, but there aren’t massive margins for discounting,” says Joseph. “The margins just aren’t there, and we’re OK with that because we just want to offer our customers the best price that we possibly can at all times.”
The brand is quickly extending its distribution. It’s sold on Walmart’s and Color Wow’s websites as well as Amazon. It will soon be available on Nordstrom’s site. On top of those partners, it’s in negotiations with major brick-and-mortar retailers to roll out at physical locations once the pandemic eases. Trademark Beauty has been delving into drop-ship arrangements.
“We’ve seen so many companies go from being 30% online to 50% to 60% percent online, so they’re eager to get as many SKUs online as they can, and they don’t necessarily want to take the risk or they don’t have the fulfillment set up to more than double their inventory for online,” says Joseph. “With these drop-shipping methods, it’s a great way for us to tap into the other people’s customer base, and the margins are still really there for us because it’s not the same as wholesale.”
Hair salons are vital venues for Trademark Beauty as well. Joseph says, “A lot of hair salons carry styling products, but not many of them offer hair tools, so you end up sending your clients away to go get that Revlon dryer on Amazon or wherever else, and you’re not making the money.”
By the end of the year, Trademark Beauty aims to offer a full range of products to address everything its customers need to style their hair. And the brand plans to branch out beyond the hair category to skincare with serums featuring vitamins C and E, hyaluronic acid and retinol, and a three-pack of oils spotlighting castor, jojoba, and argan oils that can be mixed with conditioners and body lotions. Joseph says, “We really see so much space in all ends of the industry for improvement, even if the improvement is only giving things at a better price point and making it more fun.”
Joseph enjoys freedom from investor pressure, but thinks Trademark Beauty will be open to external investment eventually. He’s interested in the brand stringing together a series of product hits prior to that happening.
“When you’ve done it with one product, great, when you’ve done it with two products, great, but, once we’ve done it with an entire line, I think it will be less of a conversation and more about, ‘This is what we are, this is what works for us,’ and people will be less interested in trying to change us and make us the most profitable, and they’ll want to run with our idea more,” says Joseph, adding, “Or so I hope.”
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