Julian Addo on launching hair-care brand Adwoa Beauty: 'It was my calling'

For Julian Addo, founder and CEO of textured hair-care brand Adwoa Beauty, her business is deeply intertwined with her own life story.

Addo was born in Monrovia, Liberia to a Ghanaian father and Liberian mother and moved to the U.S. in 1982. She worked in a beauty salon as a stylist and then as a salon owner. After a period in banking, while still doubling as a salon owner, Addo began to see how the DTC space was disrupting not only business models, but also branding itself. Inspired by the likes of Glossier and Warby Parker, Addo saw a stark lack of such branding innovation in the natural and textured hair sector. She said she woke up one day in March 2016 determined to develop Adwoa Beauty, which shares Addo’s traditional Ghanian name meaning “female born on a Monday.”

“I knew that I had to pull from my life and my experiences and my vision super heavily so that I could enjoy the brand, because it came from a passionate place,” Addo shared on this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Adwoa Beauty has been a Sephora-exclusive brand since Nov. 2019 and has 11 products. It plans to expand to an additional 158 doors in the first half of 2022, to a total of 448 U.S. Sephora doors. Adwoa Beauty is also in 48 Sephora Canada doors and will expand to all 98 locations. Approximately 65% of Adwoa Beauty sales are from Sephora, and Adwoa grew its Sephora sales 200% year-over-year between 2021 and 2020.

“For me, it’s about being smart on where we go and how we move. We want to grow but not grow too fast, because there are a lot of pain points that come with just spreading yourself too thin,” said Addo. “I never really saw Adwoa Beauty as a type of brand that was in 100,000 doors. I want this brand to provide its audience with an experience they hadn’t had before.”