The launch of Fenty Beauty in 2017 marked a turning point for diversity within the beauty industry, as makeup brands were tasked with matching the new standards of Fenty’s foundation shade range of 40 colors. Brands like Revlon and Dior stepped up to the plate with more inclusive shade ranges. Meanwhile. a blank space remained in the beauty industry for brands catering to Afro-textured hair. Maeva Heim, founder and CEO of Bread Beauty Supply, a Black-owned hair-care brand catered to textured hair, aimed to fill this gap with Bread Beauty Supply.

Heim, an Australia native, worked within the beauty industry prior to launching Bread, so she experienced the lack of inclusivity in the hair-care sector from an insider's perspective, as well as from the perspective of a Black female customer. “The brands that I was working on personally -- and even the brands in the beauty industry, in general -- weren't speaking to me as a woman of color,” she said on the latest Glossy Beauty podcast.

Bread, which offers products including a scalp-serum, hair masks and oils for curl types 3a to 4c, came into fruition during the pandemic, in July of 2020. Since then, sales for the brand, which has a core customer who is “young in her career" and "on that cusp between Gen Z [and] millennial,” have tripled, said Heim.

Now, Bread Beauty Supply is available on both breadbeautysupply.com and sephora.com. According to Heim, she's successfully created an indie brand that “resonates” with customers in a way “that a giant, multinational corporation can't.” And, while Bread’s partnership with Sephora is set to continue, Heim aims to expand her brand in a bigger way.

“Our priority is existing where our customer wants us to exist, and we're constantly refining what that looks like in the next 3-5 years, and where we need to go and exist internationally,” she said. “Because this issue and this gap exist not just in the U.S., but [also] in pretty much every Western market.”

#553 - JESSIE JOHNSON