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The wig industry, which targets women of color, is an estimated $13 billion market. Black women face special challenges in building these wigs, and the process typically involves sitting with stylists for eight hours or more.
Consisting of four black women, two with MBAs from Wharton and two with PhDs from MIT, they founded Parfait in the belief that using technology would build a better and more efficient way to design and build these wigs. Co-founder and CEO Isokon Igbinion, her sister CTO Ifueko Igbinedion, COO Marlyse Reeves, and CMO Simone Kendle have created an innovative process that incorporates a unique combination of artificial intelligence augmented by human stylists to make wigs faster, cheaper and better.
The four women have built a solution that allows women to simply choose a wig and answer a series of questions to create the final design. They’ve mixed this with machine learning to help with sizing and color accuracy, bringing in human stylists to make final decisions when necessary. They took the idea to market and received a $5 million seed investment led by Upfront Ventures.
Recognizing the problem
Black women who spend hours with stylists building their own wigs bring a personal insight into the industry the team is trying to serve.
“For all of us, all of us, including many women, it started as a problem with managing and caring for fine hair,” Isoken told me.
As part of her MBA program at the Wharton School of Business, she began looking at how Isocon technology could be applied to the black women’s hair care product industry. She found that while consumers are willing to spend a lot of money on such products, there is little attention paid to this market.
What’s more, when she looked at how technology, specifically machine learning and AI, could help streamline wig design and manufacturing, she realized that existing models lacked the diversity needed for this application.
“And then Research Parfait was born out of this mission to create technology products and experiences that truly recognize and prioritize all people,” she said. We’re doing that by addressing the margins, addressing people of color — and that starts with wigs.
When she wanted to start the company, Isocon turned to her sister Ifueko, a data scientist with a PhD from MIT, to help her build the machine learning models on which her solutions depend. It is worth noting that they grew up in the same household with seven other siblings.
The company has built a digital workflow that cuts processing time from hours with stylists on the company website.
This process involves choosing a wig and then filling out an online questionnaire that includes your skin tone, hair texture and color, desired length, type of haircut, part style, type of wig, whether you want it included. Use glue or not and finally how you plan to prepare your natural hair for the wig. Based on this information, Wig will price you. After you provide your credit card, Parfait will ship the finished wig to you within 7-9 business days.
If you’re afraid to make these choices yourself, you can first book a 15-minute online consultation with a stylist.
“I think the main pain point we’re really solving is making an old process more streamlined for users,” Ifueko explained. “So you can tell the end-to-end user journey: they go to a website, spend 20 minutes on a page, get a wig done, pay, take a picture and then they’re on their way. “
Parfait’s four co-founders: Isokon Iginidion, Efuiko Iginidion, Marlise Reeves and Simon Kendall. Image Credits: Parfait
As part of the process, the company performs an in-depth face swap so customers can see what they look like in a particular wig.
“In addition to digitizing this process, we’re also using machine learning to do product size and edge matching, so people can feel confident in their purchases and that’s what actually happens,” she said. he said.
Instead of using AI to augment human stylists, Parfait is flipping that idea, and the stylists augment AI when needed. “So not only are we using streamlined, site-based manufacturing processes, but we have a team of stylists who support our back end with expert knowledge of wig color and sizing in this process. Draw and say, ‘Oh, that’s a little projection left,'” she said.
She said they are not excluding people from the process. Moreover, when human stylists make these adjustments, it updates the data set, and should make the process better and more accurate in the future.
Overcoming the obstacles of investors
With a clever solution, a large addressable market, and a high-powered team of co-founders, you’d think it would be easy to get funding for this idea, but many people of color face obstacles when it comes to finding it. investment dollars. AAnd the challenge is even more difficult for women of color. As Dominic-Madori Davies of TechCrunch found out In a recent articleWomen of color receive precious few investment resources.
Last year, women raised just 2 percent of the $330 billion in venture capital raised. Of that, just under 0.50% went to black women, 0.51% to Latina founders, an estimated 0.71% to Asian women, and just 0.004% to Native American founders, according to Crunchbase data.
Trying to get investors to understand the scope of the problem and the size of the market that could be reached was a challenge, Esoken said, especially when many investors didn’t understand the target market.
“It was very difficult. No one would give us the time of day at first. No one believed in space. They didn’t feel it was a big enough problem. And they didn’t fully understand that technology was the solution to solve it,” she said.
That’s why a black investor like Coby Fuller at Upfront Ventures took to investing in the idea. Fuller really sees a huge potential that many other investors fail to tap into. “They created a $13 billion and revolutionary product that’s about disrupting an underserved industry, and it’s weird that more people don’t think about it,” Fuller said.
Part of the problem, he believes, is a lack of black check writers in venture capital, understanding that there are diverse markets out there that traditional VC firms are missing for whatever reason.
“I think there should be more black check writers who are willing and eager to find these founders and not only because the community deserves support, but because I think there should be more black check writers who can quickly understand these capital-worthy use cases and have products. Innovation is being done, but these founders are also able to bring these ideas to life.” They should,” he said.
Ultimately, the four founders want to change the way women of color shop for wigs (and men, too, if they’re interested). They believe they can do this by creating a standardized process aided by technology. And to get them started, they found an investor who believed in their vision.
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