Advice for Founders From The Mane Choice’s Courtney Adeleye

For fledgling beauty brand founders, Courtney Adeleye’s story is an aspirational one. Adeleye, a former nurse from Atlanta, founded the natural line for textured hair from her home in 2013. She had spent the past year documenting the process of weaning off relaxers and growing out her natural texture, and followers requested that she sell the homemade products she was concocting using natural ingredients. She invested $500 of her own money to produce a small run of one product, and because of her existing following, quickly grew to $25 million in just four years, without Adeleye taking on a single investment. Adeleye shared advice for other founders just starting out. For Adeleye, social media was key to her success. “Early on, I went to this natural [products] show, and everyone there knew me and everything about my personal life; they knew I was a nurse, they knew my husband was a doctor,” Adeleye told the crowd. “It goes to show the power of circulation and being authentic. If you start something you may not be sure where’s it going to go, but if you are authentic about what you do, it makes everything easier.” A magazine feature early in the brand’s life drove the above

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