Monique Rodriguez says her entrepreneurial success is emblematic of turning pain into purpose. Now the founder and CEO of the Black-owned hair care brand Mielle Organics, her foray into business followed a heart-wrenching loss.
In 2013, the then-mother of two lost her infant son. She experienced a uterine rupture while eight months pregnant and was rushed to the hospital, where doctors discharged her instead of keeping her for observation. She returned home, unaware that her son was losing oxygen to his brain each day. He was born brain-dead. Rodriguez, a labor and delivery nurse turned home health nurse, kept him on life support until he passed away at six months old.
“My husband couldn't get me through that. My mom couldn't get me through that. Nothing could get me through other than leaning on God and knowing I went through this pain because there was a bigger purpose,” she told me in a Fortune Executive Exchange interview.
Rodriguez had to return to work shortly after losing her son, battling both the emotional turmoil that comes from a tragic loss and postpartum depression.
Desperately seeking a creative outlet to subdue the pain, she turned to social media. She began posting hair care and hairstyle tutorials for textured hair, her homemade concoctions for growing and strengthening the hair, and discussing her hair struggles as a woman of color. Her Instagram grew slowly but had high engagement from Black women who found the content relatable and wanted organic products for natural hair.
At this point, social media was a side hustle of sorts, but she knew nursing wasn’t her calling. With just 500 Instagram followers and a brand that was just six months old, she left her nursing career to pursue entrepreneurship full-time. It was a big risk, she admits, but one worth taking.
Rodriguez launched Mielle in 2014 with one product, a mint almond oil. She had 100 bottles worth of inventory, and given that she wasn’t well-known, she figured selling all the products would be a long and arduous six-month process. “The day that we launched, we sold out of every bottle. And that was, like, the ‘aha!’ like, ‘Okay, I think I'm really onto something.’"
Her husband, Melvin, came onboard to help pack and ship the items, but they had another problem: How would they get more inventory?
“Funding was the issue,” says Rodriguez. “We had to bootstrap.” They used their savings and paychecks from her husband's job, which required long wait times in between each restock, but customers were willing to wait, she says.
In 2016, just a year and a half after launching Mielle, she inked a deal with Sally Beauty to sell the products in 95 stores. “They said, ‘We’re gonna test you guys out to see how you do.’”
On February 19, 2016 ("I'll never forget the day," Rodriguez says), Mielle sold out of all 95 stores in less than two hours. Customers were flocking to Sally stores, even those that weren’t test stores, and “harassing” the associates, asking for the product. So much so that it reached Sally Beauty’s CEO. “They gave us a call, and they're like, ‘Whatever you guys are doing on social media, please stop it because it's causing chaos in our corporate building.’”
It was yet another aha moment for Rodriguez. Still, funding was an issue, and raising capital remained a significant challenge. “We basically bootstrapped until 2020 when we took our first investment from New Voices.” Before then, they’d been operating with a line of credit. “We heard so many no's. People just kept closing their doors left and right.”
One person who didn’t shut the door was Richelieu Dennis, a fellow Black founder. Dennis made his fortune through the massively popular beauty company Shea Moisture, Sundial, and other consumer products and helped launch the VC firm New Voices. That was a pivotal moment for Mielle. “After that investment, we saw, like, 4x growth, and that's when we started attracting the eyes of private equity firms that wanted to now invest in us,” says Rodriguez.
Things took an even greater upward turn when, in 2021, the Boston-based private equity firm Berkshire Partners invested $100 million into Mielle. It’s a particularly notable feat given that in 2021, Black-founded startups received 1.4% of all U.S. venture funding, and just 71 Black women have raised $1 million or more in VC funding from 2021 to 2023. “Being the first African American to raise that much and to still maintain majority ownership, it was huge,” Rodriguez says.
In January 2023, consumer goods company Procter & Gamble, No. 50 on this year’s Fortune 500 list, acquired Mielle, retaining Rodriguez and her husband as CEO and COO, respectively. The announcement was met with some skepticism from Black consumers, who lambasted the founder for being a sellout.
Rodriguez rejects that characterization, which she notes is almost exclusively thrown toward Black-owned brands. She says she sold up, not out, because her goal from day one was to make Mielle a global brand for people with textured hair. “Our community should have access to high quality, great performing products wherever they go,” she says.
Partnering with P&G provides the infrastructure and financial support to build more brand awareness and hire Black scientists and chemists to further the innovation, she adds.
Rodriguez likens the P&G courtship to a dating process. “When you partner with someone, the most important thing is do you guys have the same vision? Do you guys have the same goals?” She was impressed by the diversity of the P&G team that made the deal happen—something she didn't see from P&G competitors sniffing around Mielle. But what really sealed the deal, Rodriguez says, is that the company came to the table and asked, "How can we help you advance your community?"
Though she refrained from sharing specific dollar amounts, Rodriguez says that since partnering with P&G, Mielle has seen over 50% growth.
She ends with a final thought on the feedback over Mielle’s acquisition: “For [the Black community] to have more access, to have more resources, we need more entrepreneurs to build their brands, to scale it, to take on investments, to have successful exits, so we can then take that and pour that back into our community—and not only pour that capital back into the community, but also the knowledge, the expertise, and the resources.”
Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com
