Ep. 62: How Looking Back Can Lead to Forward-Thinking Business Ideas

00:00:01

Conchita Pleasant: Culture is so important. It's just important to know where you came from and to connect with who you are to know where you're going. I would say to dig deep, find that thing that resonates with you, and share it with the world.

00:00:17

Andrea Marquez: I am your host, Andrea Marquez, and This Is Small Business, a podcast brought to you by Amazon. It's August, which means it's Black Business Month.  

Black Business Month started quite recently in 2004, an engineer slash entrepreneur named Frederick E. Jordan struggled a lot to get funding and financial backing for his company, so he teamed up with John William Templeton, the president and executive director of a scholarly publishing company, and together they started a yearly celebration to address issues that Black entrepreneurs face and to bring attention to all the successful Black-owned businesses who beat the odds.  

Today we'll be talking to Conchita Pleasant, the CEO and founder of Nefertiti's Secrets, a business that sells natural hair care products inspired by the Ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. We'll discuss the inspiration behind her brand, the challenges she faced along the way, and how she managed to turn to ancient remedies to develop her product. Conchita's entrepreneurial journey starts with a breast cancer diagnosis in 2011.

00:01:33

Conchita Pleasant: That was pretty devastating because I had a young daughter and it was just a really sad diagnosis because you have a child and that's something so serious, and so I had to go through that journey of trying to save my life. They told me that the chemo, so I decided to go ahead and go through with that, which to be honest with you, I didn't want to do it, but I knew I had to.

00:01:55

Andrea Marquez: Thank you for sharing that. I feel like a lot of powerful stories start with a cancer journey. My mom has cancer and it isn't an easy journey at all. She started chemotherapy recently and we had to shave her hair off and seeing her go through that is just... I'm so sorry you had to go through that.

00:02:17

Conchita Pleasant: I wasn't as brave as your mom to shave it all off. So I waited and that was the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me. So it just came up and as I was shampooing one day and it was just all just bald back there, and so I went through that phase of depression because this... Sorry, I get a little choked up when I talk about it because it's this sensitive, but I went through a little bit of depression because I was not only fighting for my life, it was an aggressive cancer and I was just so used to having all my hair and I lost 18 inches of it, and so I was attached to it, to be honest with you, and I had to go through this point where I'm just like, okay, I got to find a solution.

00:02:59

Andrea Marquez: You don't have to apologize at all. Everybody's cancer journey is, regardless of what they look like, they're going to be hard, and something that can seem trivial as hair in our daily lives turns into something so significant and symbolic. When you're going through cancer, I don't think people usually think about this unless they're going through a similar journey. Your hair is almost like this part of your identity that you rarely think about until they tell you you might have to shave it off.

00:03:30

Conchita Pleasant: Exactly, exactly. That is exactly what happened, and I was thinking to myself, well, it's not going to go away, but of course, life happens and you all of a sudden don't have hair and you have to live through it. And I was wearing wigs and I was really going through it because the chemo makes you depressed as well.

00:03:49

Andrea Marquez: For four months after Conchita started chemo, the doctors told her that her hair would grow back in two months, but when the time passed, nothing happened. So Conchita decided to take matters into her own hands.

00:04:02

Conchita Pleasant: I drew from one of my favorite Ancient Egyptian queens, Nefertiti. When I was younger, I had to write a bio on her and it just empowered me. It just inspired me to see how she was such a beautiful and powerful queen, and I felt like it did something for my self-esteem. It stuck with me, so I said, “Let me go back and check in some natural remedies from the ancient Egyptian times.” Bought books and everything, and I started putting together a product and using aloe, moringa, which they found in King Tut's tomb. I mean, I really dug and I found some good information and I put those ingredients together and started using that product on my bald head. It was surreal to have something that you put together and I said, “Oh, I need to share this with the world.”

00:04:55

Andrea Marquez: Conchita used to work in the hair industry, not with formulating products. That was new territory for her, but she knew a lot of hairstylists, so she created samples of her product and sent them out to get some feedback.

00:05:08

Conchita Pleasant: And I gave it to different hairstylists from all ethnicities, and I waited for their feedback because I wanted a product that can actually work for all ethnicities. I didn't want to leave anybody out. Then started getting feedback, and I was told that at first, it was like maybe seven out of 10, I said, “No, I have to get this perfect.”

00:05:26

Andrea Marquez: So she went back to the drawing board, started working with another chemist to perfect her formula, then sent it back out to get another round of feedback.

00:05:34

Conchita Pleasant: And those samples that I was giving out, those people were saying, “Can we have more? Can we have more?” And so all 10 of them loved the product, so that was just a great indication that it was time to go to the next level.

00:05:47

Andrea Marquez: And how did Conchita's product jump from a seven to a 10? She asked questions like, why wouldn't you buy this product? And listened to what her customers wanted.

00:05:58

Conchita Pleasant: When they told me what it was, well, it didn't make the hair as soft as I would want to or it was a little heavy, and so I just started tweaking it with the chemists and we maybe took out some things, added some more things. I actually use a special formula, a special blend that's not like heavy oils because I don't want the products to weigh the hair down, and so we just work with that.

00:06:22

Andrea Marquez: By the way, she was handling all this while she was battling cancer and undergoing treatment.

00:06:28

Conchita Pleasant: I would literally go to the chemist the next day after chemo, and that's how passionate I am about this.

00:06:34

Andrea Marquez: That's so inspiring to hear because I know seeing it from my mom, it's so exhausting.

00:06:39

Conchita Pleasant: It's exhausting.

00:06:41

Andrea Marquez: Good days and bad days is what we call them, right? And in the world of business, it seems like you just have to power through a lot. Right?

00:06:50

Conchita Pleasant: Exactly.

00:06:52

Andrea Marquez: After Conchita perfected her formula and got hairstylists with different backgrounds and hair textures to give her product their stamp of approval, she decided to start mass-producing her product.

00:07:02

Conchita Pleasant: The chemist I was working with, he saw what I was going through. He saw my passion and he actually helped me. He's like, “ You don't have to start off with a large amount. We'll start you off with a couple of hundred pieces.”

00:07:13

Andrea Marquez: So Conchita goes to a distributor for professional hairstylists.

00:07:18

Conchita Pleasant: And he said to me, “ Well, we already heard about your product.” And I'm like, “How is that?” He's like, “Those stylists that you went to my salespeople have been talking to them and they said,”  Please get Conchita's product because it works. “And I'm like, “All right, wow.” So he ordered that day, he gave me a nice order and I was like, “ Wow, I don't have product for this order.” And so that was the beginning of me actually mass producing, and actually, it was perfect because it's hard to have a door. Sometimes, you have the idea and then you mass produce and who do you sell to?

You have to try to push a product that doesn't have a track record, but at the end of the day, I was just so blessed that he said, “Hey, give me like 24 cases,” and they were case packs of I would tell him 24. I had no idea what I was doing. To this day, hairstylists really loved this product, and that's really what got the brand going because once you have been endorsed by hairstylists, it really, I mean, it helps the brand take off. Since then, we've been creating new products and also pivoting and changing when I need to.

00:08:28

Andrea Marquez: That's such an important thing to be able to pivot and change when needed, especially since the beauty industry is so competitive and if you don't adapt, you'll probably get left behind. So considering that, and of course everything that you were already going through, did you have any fears and doubts about your business while you were working on it?

00:08:50

Conchita Pleasant: I think the fear just went away, honestly. Once I saw how great this product was and I found a need, and I met the need because if they felt like this product was so great, then that meant to me that there was an opening there. I really didn't worry about the competition because I feel like I had something unique to bring to the world, and that was my assignment.  

So that's the thing. You just have to find the need and not so much worry about the competition. And I had a couple of great mentors along the way that gave me advice, things that I needed to change, to fix with my packaging because it's good to do assessments and ask questions and do surveys to find out what you need to do to pivot and change when you need to.

00:09:36

Andrea Marquez: Conchita's story is empowering, which isn't surprising since empowering customers is at the core of Nefertiti's Secrets.

00:09:45

Conchita Pleasant: The basis of this brand is based on royalty. So when I was growing up, I was teased so much. I thought it was the ugliest thing, walking really. I had them little freckles and I was different, and back then freckles weren't really that embraced like they are now, and so between that and the name, Conchita, they were teasing me left and right. It did affect my self-esteem, and when I did that bio on Nefertiti that was out the door, I just became so empowered. So this is what I want for my customer. I formulate products to help empower them to feel great about themselves. I want them to remember their worth, so when they see that logo, I want them to feel worthy of having the best of everything in life.

00:10:38

Andrea Marquez: I love that Conchita looked to the past to find a solution for a problem a lot of people face today and if her story inspired you to do something similar. Here's some advice from Conchita.

00:10:48

Conchita Pleasant: Culture is so important. It's just important to know where you came from and to connect with who you are to know where you're going. I would say to dig deep, find that thing that resonates with you, and share it with the world. Fear is going to come in. I can't say that I didn't have fear. I faced a lot of fear in this journey. Fear of failure at times. Fear on every level, but my advice is to be fluid, be open to change when you need to and break fear by moving forward because once you break fear, you can break into your next level.

00:11:29

Andrea Marquez: I'm feeling empowered after talking to Conchita. It seems like the essence of her brand is helping other people, whether that's through her wonderful story or from getting results from her products. That was Conchita Pleasant, the CEO of Nefertiti's Secret. That's it for today's episode.  

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That's it for this episode of This Is Small Business, brought to you by Amazon. Until next time, I'm your host, Andrea Marquez. Hasta luego, and thanks for listening. This Is Small Business is brought to you by Amazon with technical and store production by JAR Audio.