How 2 hair stylists turned a costly failure into a business that’s making millions

In 2004, hair stylist and businesswoman Miko Branch created the wildly popular hair care line, Miss Jessie’s, with her late sister Titi Branch. Their business launched at a time when few stores had hair products for women of color.

Now, the natural hair care industry is booming thanks in part to ethnic women embracing their natural hair as well as investments from retail heavy-hitters like Target, Walgreens and CVS who see the value in catering to a wider demographic.

In fact, according to market research firm Mintel, the black hair market is projected to hit $1.4 billion by 2020. “Women with textured hair are no longer the minority,” Branch tells CNBC Make It. “And retailers now see this as a profitable market.”

Today, Miss Jessie’s, which was one of the pioneers in the ethnic hair care market and has won numerous beauty awards, has become a multimillion-dollar business with thousands of products in hundreds of retail stores worldwide. One of the most notable parts of the company’s success is that its products have created a market for entrepreneurs to cater to the multicultural space.

However, it wasn’t always smooth sailing for the creators of Miss Jessie’s. Branch tells CNBC Make It that learning from a costly failure early on is why they were able to achieve such rapid success.

In 1997, the Branch sisters opened their first hair salon. The two had little to no formal training or mentors in the traditional sense but they were hungry for success and knew that they loved hair. They used $8,000 to purchase a brownstone in Boerum, Hill Brooklyn and quickly began to expand the business.

In 1999, their business failed. The sisters, who were in their mid-20s, had no job, an expensive mortgage payment on the brownstone and Miko Branch had just given birth to a son whose father was no longer in the picture.

“We expanded too quickly … We were going too fast and didn’t take into account inventory,” Branch says. “[When the business failed] we had to think outside of the box. We had to think of the next …

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