Nancy Twine left her role as a VP at Goldman Sachs to create a clean, high performance hair care line focusing on the “skinficiation” of the scalp. Launching in 2013, Twine became the youngest Black women to launch a line at Sephora. Ten years later Briogeo is selling 40,000 units just of its award winning Don’t Despair Repair Treatment Mask every month. Briogeo is one of the top selling clean haircare brands free of harsh sulfates, silicones, phthalates, parabens, DEA and artificial dyes with plant-based ingredients that detoxify, hydrate, and protect every hair type + texture.
Twine decided to leave her career in finance after she lost her mom which prompted her to do some soul searching on how she was spending her time and impacting the world, “My mom actually was a physician and a chemist so growing up we used to make a lot of our own products at home. Partly due to the fact that a lot of the products that were on the market didn’t cater to our skin types or our hair texture. So we were taking matters into our own hands, making our own formulas that were hydrating enough for our hair type, had enough slip to actually detangle our hair and all of these things that we were missing on the market. During that soul searching journey of trying to figure out what it was I wanted to do next, I thought back to how much I loved making these like clean but very functional beauty products seeing that there was a void in clean haircare. There also weren’t any other brands that were truly creating products that were efficacious for all different hair types. That was an ‘aha’ moment that I could take that idea and thing that I used to do with my mom and actually turn it into a business.”
As Twine reflects back on the success of Briogeo she attributes the brands growth to being first to market at the right time and in the right space. “I launched Briogeo while I was still working at Goldman Sachs and it was a really interesting time to be entering the beauty industry because there was so much white space. We were the first clean haircare brand at Sephora but now there are dozens of haircare brands at Sephora in the category as it has expanded quite a bit. I think back at what ultimately what put Briogeo on the map. We pioneered the clean, haircare revolution while focusing on sustainability before it became a more widespread topic in beauty. We were also the first prestige haircare lines to really focus on all hair textures and types. When I started my brand most of us were really bootstrapping our companies. There weren’t a lot of faces that looked like me starting businesses in the industry. A few years into launching we also had the rise of the YouTube beauty influencer and subscription boxes like FabFitFun and Ipsy. This allowed us to grow a grassroots community that propelled us to the next level in addition to continuing to add new innovations like Scalp Revival,” she shared.
In 2022 Briogeo was sold to Wella for a nine figures. “The sale to Wella was a huge milestone for me and it was very strategic because I knew if we wanted to continue to grow I could continue to fundraise and dilute myself or find a permanent partner that would support the business from a capital and resource perspective.”
In addition to enhancing the leadership at Briogeo, the brand now has entered salons nationwide with Salon Centric. “Briogeo is doubling down on innovation and that’s why it was such a strategic decision to partner with Wella whose core competency is within haircare, so that we could not only leverage their expertise and professional to help us really sort of win in this new salon category, but to also help us to continue to stay at the forefront of innovation, especially as the category becomes more saturated, there are more players who are innovating in the space at the same time,” Twine added.
Twine has also expanded her personal and entrepreneurial endevours as Briogeo continues to scale. Over the last few years, she has been an active investor in multiple startups across the beauty, wellness, food & beverage, tech, and real estate industries. She is also considered a leading expert in entrepreneurship, growth mindset, and female leadership. Her combined experience as a founder, investor and mentor led her to start NancyTwine.com where she shares a multidimensional perspective with her community. “The site is here to help support all stages of female entrepreneurship from the women contemplating quitting their jobs to start a new company, to a scaling startup, a founder raising VC money for the first to the post-exit founder. There were so many things that I had to navigate as a first-time entrepreneur on my own which came with many mistakes. My goal is to be able to help people on their journey not make some of the mistakes I made on the way. But it is also important to focus on the whole human outside of your company so I talk about things like wellness, nutrition, self-care, relationships etc. I learned that it is really hard to get to a place of success with your business if you are not also in a successful place with yourself. Because at the end of the day, when you are an entrepreneur, scaling your business, you are your biggest asset.”
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