My League Tale is the founder and chief experience officer of Kurlbox, the first monthly subscription service for naturally curly hair. An astute businesswoman who prior to venturing
into beauty had a notable career as a public relations executive. My League's ability to instinctively identify in market popular trends to the masses guarded her opportunities to work with brands such as Calvin Klein Cosmetics, the Grammy Awards, Nike, and a stellar roster of clients across the entertainment, tech, and beauty industries since the launch of CurlBOX in two eleven. Laurel Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Target, and Walmart is just a short list of brands that have trusted my
League's vision in marketing. She regularly gives inspiring talks around the country centered around business, personal branding, and women's empowerment. Today we'll hear from my League, who walks us through her journey to a millie. A million in sales, a million in revenue, a million followers, or a million in funding. To amass one million of anything is a major feet and that's why we're highlighting women who have done just that you'll hear from women who have made their
mark, impacted lives, blaze trails, and amassed a millie. My dream job as a kid, I was obsessed with beet when I was younger, Like video soul was my thing, and as soon as I would get home from school, I would like run to turn on videos. That's what I remember my mom. If ever I was going to have something taken away, it would be that I couldn't watch videos, And so I didn't know sort of like what kind of job I would have, but I knew that it
had to be something related to like music videos. So it doesn't surprise me that I worked in the music industry first, because I didn't know what I was going to do. But I was like, I want to be in the music video. I want to either be in it, I want to be on the side of it, I want to be up under it.
But I was music video obsessed. My business Kurlbox, started because I was doing some tech PR at the time, so I would say maybe seven eight years ago, I was representing I had a tech client, so I'd always have to read sort of like the tech news, and deep in the tech news, I read an article about subscriptions making a comeback, and they were
beauty. It was beauty focused, and I knew when I read it that it was not going to be centered on Black women, and I knew that black women needed samples more than anyone, and so Anne just needed this subscription because of how stores just don't tend to cater to us as it relates to our beauty needs. And so I just was like, this is a fantastic idea and resurgence, but how can I do something for us? And so
I had the idea. I quit it so many times because I kept saying to myself, you don't have the skills, you don't have the knowledge, you don't have the contacts, you don't even really know what you're doing, So there's no way you could do this. And so every day I talked myself out of it, but every morning I'd wake up feeling incredibly pregnant with this idea, until I got to the point that I just had to launch
it. So I fake launched it with like a splash page and collecting email addresses, and it had so much interest that it sort of forced me to launch it. And literally the stars just aligned and everything just took off. Everything I didn't know, somebody came along and offered their services, even as far as people on Twitter offering to help me for free with things they probably
thought I needed to know. So we have been in business, we have been running for it'll be seven years in January, which is just crazy. And now I would say that I am still the chief experience Officer, if you will, and I'd like to say that the look, the field of vision, and the products are all me, and then all of the production, the customer service and all of that stuff is the wonderful team around me. Even the first day that I launched that splash page, I remember,
like the emails. I had a BlackBerry at the time and I don't have it. I used to have like I'm I guess, like notifications on or where I would get an email when someone would sign up, and it was like thunderous the way these emails were coming in. It was mind blowing how many people were interested in this, and so at that point I felt successful.
I felt like it had taken off, though I hadn't collected any money at the time, the way that people were so interested in it, I knew it was going to take off, I was like, if a thousand people have signed up in it was like it was like hours. It was like if a thousand people have signed up in like four or five hours, and I mean it was just like a thousand every few hours. I was like, I know that when I get ready to sell this, and my first round of sales, my first round of sales, I was only letting
in two hundred and thirty five members and that sold out. I want to say, the very first time I did it, we sold that out in one week. And then the second time we sold out in twenty four hours, and then it just kept getting twelve hours, and now we sell out. I don't even know if we it lasts an hour or two. I think something that I learned early on when I first started out in PR was cold calling. A lot of that. I used to do music press,
and then I used to do my quote unquote specialty was daily newspapers. So if somebody, if someone was coming out with an album, it was my job to make sure it was reviewed or sort of advanced in all of the daily papers in the US, and that's a lot of newspapers. And I'd email, i'd call, and that job and that doing that specifically sort of built up my I guess you could say my skin for rejection. You know.
So when I launched CurlBOX, it was the ultimate cold call. I had very little contacts, you know, and I just I had sort of put together a press list, if you will, of all the beauty brands that I wanted to contact, And once I got on that phone, it was like I wasn't even tripping, like I wasn't even sweating it. Like I was just like, I'm blowing through these calls. Now I'm calling for something, you know. Now, I'm not calling to ask you to cover
an album. I'm calling to ask you to be a part of something that I'm so passionate about. And I would say that of all those phone calls that I made, I think I had like maybe a couple hundred contacts on that list that I had spent the summer building up I got. You know, I would say that I got through to about half of those people, and I got about a quarter of those people to participate. And so I think that had I been afraid of people being like, so what is it?
And you know, all of that cold calling early in my career built my skin up and kind of just helped me navigate when people would, you know, every time somebody would ask me something that maybe I didn't know the answer, I didn't buckle, you know, I just I just would like, you know what, I'm going to collect, I'll have all that information for you, and then I would put it in the email and I have to go back because they would they would say to me, well, how
many ounces do you want? And I'm like, uh, I don't know, and but you know in my mind, but I would just say, you know what, I'm going to take all of this back to the team. And when I'm talking back to the team, it was like back to myself, I'm gonna take all of this back to the team, and I'm gonna get back to you with an email. And that is really being able
to cold call has really helped me in my career. And I didn't even know, like I know this now because I've been doing this for almost a decade, but I didn't even know that the typical bottle sizes eight ounces, you know, but people in the industry and business know that. So when they're asking me, so that the typical size for a shampoos like eight ounces, but sometimes the you know, three ounces would be a deluxe sample.
Two ounces would also be a deluxe sample, you know, and then you have a half ounce and an ounce, and so I can now eyeball all of that. But at the time, and they were talking all of this, I was just like clueless. You know, I'm like going to I had to like go to CVS and look at a bunch of bottles to really
get an idea of what the heck they were talking about. As we dig more into the origin story in early days of curl Box, I want my leak to share with us what those very very early days looked like when this idea was simply just an idea before the movement on the project. What are the first things that she did? First thing I did was I have a
friend. My best friend went to West Point and his best friend. They went to West Point together and then they went on to get their NBA's and every time, you know, we for fun would sit around talking about all these cool business ideas, and funny enough, my business idea before carol Box
was actually modern day tender, which they shot down. They did not think it was a good idea, but we talked about my sort of tended idea, and then we talked about the crow box idea, and then the two of them are really good at you know, I always say that, like Brian is the one who's just like, oh, yeah, you can definitely
make this happen. This is how you do it. And then I had another My friend Ken is always sort of like the antagonist or pessimist if you will, still wanting you to do it, but he always will introduce you to the challenges, and every challenge that he said I was going to have, I basically have had. So I'm super grateful to him for that because it was almost like I was prepared in advanced but after talking to those guys, I had a better idea of sort of like what steps I needed to
take, and there were a lot. It was a lot of work, but I think the action steps were, you know, number one, you're going to have to figure out how to get the product. And so the first thing I did was building my list, which is what I learned in my career and my PR career is like I built my list and it took me about three months to build my list, so that when I launched it,
I knew which direction I was going to go in. After that, I worked the logo a bunch of different times, after three different graphic designers, I finally settled on what I liked. I took that and I found somebody that can make boxes, and that took a little bit of time, and I got the numbers, you know, so I figured out how much I was going to need, so it was like, how much is it
going to cost to get the boxes? Still, I once I had my list together, and then I think after that it was just figuring out that sort of like logistical piece, which, funny enough, I told you Ken and Brian, those two best friends, Ken being my best friend. Brian
has since become a really good friend of mine. They went to West Point and then they introduced me to another one of their West Point classmates who owned a sort of like logistics fulfilling company, and he just basically I went in for a meeting with him for advice, and he basically took me on no credit, no money upfront, So everything kind of just like lined up. But those were those like action steps to getting it from an idea out into
the universe, and then the rest of it. I pretty much learned along the way, I think we grew like nine It was something crazy like it
was like seven hundred or nine hundred percent or something wicket like that. The first year, like we went from zero to one hundred, literally, And so my growth process was we started out with like two hundred something, and I think the next month we went to like five hundred, and then I think the next month we went to like a thousand, and from there we just kept ticking up and ticking up and picking up, and we got to a point where, you know, I felt like I needed to give the
industry some time to catch up, and some days I still feel like that, Like the black beauty industry has come a long way in the past seven years, but still has some growing to do. I think a lot there are a lot more companies catering to us, making things nicer for us, more beautiful, more interesting. But I grew very quickly, which led to
a lot of I guess, emotional stress, if you will. I wasn't prepared to I think I was mentally prepared to do the work, which I always did and have been, but I was not mentally prepared for success at all. I wasn't prepared for the kind of success that I got and so quickly, so I think for my entire life, I just wanted to win. I wanted to you know. I was taking my jaghammer across that brick
and it finally exploded, and it literally exploded in my face. And so, yes, it was this sort of wild and amazing almost instantaneous success. But on the downside of it, I guess the stuff that I wasn't prepared for is that I was prepared for people's reactions towards me. That part was hard. It's like that fine print of success is that you're not really you just don't know how other people are going to take the success around you,
and so some people get really jealous. And I don't care how strong people think they are. It's really hard sometimes for let's just say a friend or a family member who, let's just say they have been working harder than you over the years, or you know, maybe they've struggled more than you have, and then you just come along and you have this idea that hits, or maybe they have better ideas over the years, but the stars just didn't line up for them, and so it's really hard to sort of to handle
that there's also a level of guilt that I had. You know, I didn't feel like I didn't feel like I deserved all of this success, you know. It was just it seemed like I've had tons of ideas over the years. I've succeeded in a lot of ways, but the rewards around this particular idea were tremendous in a way that I felt guilty about. I think a lot of times we think that money, you know, success, access accolades will make us happy, and that is absolutely not what it did.
I feel like, more than anything, I guess, I really feel like it just highlighted my unhappiness. Like it that success sort of everything got big at that time, and it's like even the bad stuff got big too, And so I definitely I would say things exploded for me at the top of maybe twenty twelve. And by August of that year, I was sitting on the couch in therapy after having had a breakdown on the floor in New York.
And a part of that breakdown was the race. Like the race that I was running to keep this business going was hard, but it was not something that I was dropping out of, and it wasn't even something that I wanted to quit, but it was definitely heavy and exhausting. It it was not just daily, it was it was by the second, you know. I had every email, every phone called, every text message, every Instagram message, every customer service email. It was all consuming and I really didn't
know how to claw myself out of that. It took me years to find myself inside out of my business, like my identity had become that to the point that I lost myself as an individual. It was wild. Something I would not trade for the world, but something that I don't really think people understand, and I don't even know that you can prepare for it, but it is hard. My least favorite day to day thing to do in business is I do not like managing people. I don't like it at all.
I realize that I am not a good manager, if you will, I think that I am a great leader, and a lot of times being a leader is more about sort of leading by example and making sure that I'm doing the work and I have the ideas and im and I'm often putting certain things last. But I don't enjoy the sort of like day to day minutia of managing if people are doing what they're supposed to be doing. I do not
enjoy that at all. The greatest leadership lesson that I have learned since I've been doing this has been to never panic, regardless of anything that is going on. You know, sometimes it is not uncommon for let's just say something happened and one of my teammates might be freaking out. I always stay calm.
You know. Even this weekend, I was doing my life podcast and the guest isn't answering their phone off an hour before doors open, hasn't answered it all day, and everyone's kind of like forging out, like, oh my god, what are we gonna do? And I was like, I am the queen of the plot twist. I that this, and that has always been my way as a leader, is that I think that nobody wants to see the leader panic at all. You know, it's like he calm
and carry on, And that is what. I don't think they've ever seen me sweat. Most useful piece of advice that I've received in my career came from Matt Lebove when I worked at BWR. He told me to have a niche. He was like, how you should drill down on something and you should specialize in something, and he would never forgot when he said to me, he was like, if like if black women, if that's your thing,
don't be afraid for that to be your thing. And this is a person who is a well known publicist strictly to comedians, and so that was just his thing. It's like, don't be afraid to pick one thing to focus on and so get a Niche that was the best advice I think I've gotten. I didn't start my company with funding because I really didn't even know
how to get it. To be honest, I don't think that. You know, now, I know people who could probably connect me with people to get funding, but at the time, I wasn't even plugged into the people who could get funding, and so I was totally fine with that. I just I've told this story before, but I don't know how many times I've
ever told on a podcast. But when I was twenty five years old, my godparents left me money, and not a lot, but the money was to be divvied up to me over ten years, and so every January, I know, I would know that I'm getting like a little small lump sum of money. So I kind of just banked on that. So that's why my business launched in January, because that's when I knew my check would be
coming. And so when it came time for like the largest expense of the company, I just used that check to start it and the rest is history. So I guess in some ways I did have some funding, if you will, and it kind of I always think about my guyparents, who whom I love dearly, and I bet you they probably wouldn't expect for me to have taken the money that they gave me. And like, I mean, I have more than like a hundred times over, maybe not a hundred,
maybe like maybe like fifty times over. I have made that money back. So I guess I got some family funding, which is why it's really important to me to save from my child so that he has something to start a business or whatever he wants to do when he becomes a young adult. People might take this the wrong way. I think it's not a badge of honor, you know, I think that you don't. You haven't gained my respect
until you've actually earned money, until you've made some money. So there are people who have gotten funded who are making money, But there are people out there who have gotten funded ended up being a bust and still running around talking about there's some kind of boss if you will, and so I think that, you know, there are times I had somebody who gave me a really positive analysis about funding, because I've always kind of been on the fence about
it, and she essentially said, Okay, now that you have your business one hundred percent, so we'll just use one million dollars as just an easy math problem. So if your business is making one million dollars, all one million dollars is yours. But if you take funding and your business becomes an eight million dollar business, and let's just say you get half of it, now you're making four million dollars, which is a far more money than you
would have made on your own. And I'm like, this is absolutely true. However, there's a lot of stuff that you are going to give up for that four million dollars, and it may not you know, It's like, do you want to make four million dollars for two years or do you want to make one million dollars for the next twenty years. I got to where I am today by being incredibly disciplined in my life as it pertains to
my works. My superpower is time. I don't think that anybody knows how to take advantage of time better than I do, and it is such an exact and fine science for me. And I am very strict about how I allow others to use my time, especially during the week. So the way that I structure my weeks days, how I use the time, nobody can
beat me at that. Building a company brand is one thing, but increasingly it's more important now than ever to also simultaneously built a personal brand because people don't just buy into companies, they buy into stories, So creating a narrative with your brand is all the more important. And we want to hear from
my league how she seamlessly did both. If I had a young protege or a mentee, I would tell them that my personal brand is what people say about me when I'm not around, you know, And what that usually would be is like, she's a beast, she's hard working, she's disciplined, she's going to get it done. If you want somebody who's going to be there and show up on time, and you're gonna pretty much have to drag off the field, this is the girl. She is incredibly resourceful. That
is. I always wanted to bring that to the table with people of like, I know that if I'm in a situation and it's looking like it might go left, I'm going to figure it out. And so I focused on that before I tried to jump out with pictures on Instagram. It's why whenever I run into sort of like a social issue or a tift on social media, it's why it doesn't have an impact on my business because my personal brand
is not you know, my quotes or my pictures. It is what people know to be true about me. I experience imposter syndrome probably all the time. I've gotten a lot better, I will say, but like I have, I have stood on the outside of my life for many years just like WTF, Like is this? Did I really do this? You know? Do I really belong here? You know? And even feeling that way about the rewards, like why me it? You know, even though it's so
crazy. It's like I bought a house in my neighborhood, and I'll like I'll be like walking in my neighborhood with a key to my house, feeling like it's like walking past the neighbor is like like I'm breaking in It's crazy, but because it just just like I don't belong here, you know. And so it is a constant working process, especially as I go to newer heights and newer levels. It is definitely a working progress, but I plow through it. I have sacrifice a lot to get to this point in my
life. I sacrificed probably a lot of fun in some ways. And you know, in my early twenties, I sacrificed. But to me, it doesn't really feel like that, you know. I think that the things that other people would, you know, see is as missing out. It felt like a positive putting in of time. But you know, I've sacrificed.
I've missed weddings, I've missed birthdays for a couple of reasons. I missed out on a lot of things because I didn't have the time and or in my kind of like dropping down as low as I could to try to get my business off the ground, I couldn't afford to do a lot of things with people, you know. So I missed out on a lot of things that my friends were doing when I was in like Ultra grimo, and and
I still miss out. I'm at a point in my life where people don't even call me and invite me to stuff because they know I'm not coming. So I'm still inside of the sacrifice, you know. And sometimes it'll hurt because I'll see people. I'll see people getting together on social and I'm like, oh, they went to a Halloween party, but they knew that if they asked me, I was gonna say no. So it's just, you
know, it's it's what this life comes with. I've had many times in my business where you know, I've had some some big idea that I just knew people would respond to, and you know, I'll look up and we will have sold, you know, say my goal was like a thousand that I wanted to sell and will sell like, you know, fifty, and it's just like, oh, that was a bust, you know. But
I don't let that stuff get me down. I have a TED talk that I did that I just I was trying to freeze my eggs at the time, so I was like doing IVF and then the ladies who invited me to do it, they wanted me to speak about something that I really didn't want to talk about, So they wanted me to do a TED talk on like the hair business, which I really don't like to do because it's like I
didn't want to sort of out the business or anything like that. And so when I tell you that that was a total bust, that was like the worst thing that I have probably ever done professionally. What really excites me about what I'm doing professionally in terms of CurlBOX my business is how fired up it seems like people are about marketing to us, even though you know, people want us to spend our money. I feel like for so long the industry
didn't really have to work that hard for it. You know, they just never change fonts stuff. There were things that sat on the shelves for decades. And now you can't go into a store, you know, two weeks apart and not then there not be something new to help you or or to try. And that really just blows my mind and excites me and makes me
happy that black women can now go into a CVS. Like there was a time where you would never go into CVS for anything as it pertains to your hair or anything like that, and now you can do that, you can go into the grocery store. That excites me. I think if I was going to say, maybe what alarms me is what made our industry or even I think this can apply to a lot of different industries. So exciting was
this sort of authenticity, this like rawness. And I think that, you know, as smaller companies become bigger companies, where do we get that that rawness from? And so that would be something that I would be like, you know, but maybe that's just a breeding ground for more people to come through and do it again. My whole sort of like my world is centered around like making everything easier, quicker, faster, smoother, And so one thing that I'll do is how I do my whole calendar system. And so
that is something that I really love. The fantastical app I think I've told people about that. It's like thirty bucks. It's a little pricy, but very much worth it to me if you are a person who really has to like try to get a lot done with your day. I use this conference call line when I'm doing my call is called uber Conference. And what I love about Uber Conference is that when we're talking about these time hacks, is that it will send you a text message when the first person has gotten on
the line. So before I would be like, oh, it's one o'clock, let me call in, and then ding dong ding dong, ding dong ding, and nobody is showing up. And so this allows me to just keep going and then once somebody so if somebody's late, it's like, it's cool, I'll just keep moving. And once I see that somebody's on the line, then I get on the line. So there are a lot of like middle things that I do, I feel that allow me to keep it
moving. And you know, I try to use as many resources as I can and making sure that I can spend My goal is to try to be able to spend as much time as I possibly can working, which some people probably think it's crazy, but it's like, you know what, I can't do laundry because I'm working, so I outsource that I cannot do all the grocery shopping. So I'm instacrating because I need to work. And so that is how I make it so that my days are night bogged down with the
day to day stuff that we all have to do. Success means for me, you know, I have felt successful for a long time, which tends to surprise people. But I felt successful when I was doing something that I really love to do. I would say that I have loved every job that I've had. After graduating college and probably leading up to once, I kind
of made it my mind about what I wanted to do. And so even if I maybe didn't care for the environment, or maybe it was hard and maybe I wanted to leave, I definitely have always picked out and sought things that that sort of made me happy. And I feel like that is success when you're doing some when you're able to work on things that bring you joy. I'm Ayana Angel, and thank you for listening to Amelie. Produced by
Mazie Media. This episode concludes season one of the Ameli podcasts, but we will be back for more with another season of insights and stories from dynamic, trailblazing businesswomen. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out when the new season starts, and in the meantime, you can follow at Mazie Media on Instagram. If you're eager for more goodness right now, you can also tune into the Switch, Pivot or Quit podcast, also produced by Amzie Media,
for equally compelling interviews and topics concerning personal and professional development. Just search Switch, Pivot or Quit wherever you listen to podcasts. See you next season.