Good morning! Melania Trump brings back advisers from her first stint as first lady, Whoopi Goldberg announces a women's sports network, and Bozoma Saint John debuts her own brand for the first time. Have a great Tuesday.
- Hair for it. Bozoma Saint John is known for building the brands of some of the world's most influential companies; Apple, Uber, Netflix, and more. For the first time, the former CMO is now building a brand of her own, Fortune is the first to report. This morning, Saint John is launching Eve by Boz, a line of wigs and haircare products.
Saint John, 47, left her last full-time role at Netflix in early 2022 and since then has published a memoir that told her personal story of losing her husband to cancer and losing their daughter, who was born prematurely; kept up with her 500,000 Instagram followers; and joined the cast of the upcoming season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. "I thought I'd be back in a year in another corporate seat, but that year was really transformational for me," she says.
Instead, in spring of 2023, Saint John started conceiving of her own project. Haircare brands abound, but she saw opportunity in the wig category. "There's really no voice in the production process for women of color and Black women, who are the ones who are consuming a majority of the product," she says. She traveled to Guangzhou, China for a hair show, where she and her hairstylist met 40 vendors. She traveled throughout Asia, where the wig industry is concentrated. She asked questions about why the lace attached to wigs is typically light in color. "They said, ‘Because no one asked us to make it differently,’" she remembers.
Saint John declined to raise funding for her venture and put "a couple million" of her own money into the brand. "I've worked for enough big companies and got a lot of stock at a lot of places," she says. "It's time to reinvest in myself, and that's what I decided to do. Also, I can have total control. I don't want anyone telling me what to do."
She now has 10 employees and about 50 people working on the brand in total, plus a retail store in Accra, Ghana, where the brand is manufacturing its products (while still working with Asia-based suppliers). Eve by Boz is launching with 171 products, including all possible combinations of its wigs with five hair types, five lengths, and three lace colors. The wigs will sell for between $650 and $2,100, with products including shampoo and a hair perfume oil selling for between $35 and $50. Its products are available to purchase via its website, and Saint John says she's not interested in selling via retail other than her own stores.
Building her own brand has drawn on some of the skills Saint John built through her career in corporate America. "What I really love about brand-building is finding the emotional connection between whatever the product is and the consumer," she says. "So really, it doesn't matter if it's rideshare or it's music streaming or if it's a soda—that emotional conversation that you have with a consumer is magic. It's sacred."
Saint John will soon reach a new audience when her first season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills airs. While many women who appear on Housewives franchises use the platform to promote their brands—from original business-minded star Bethenny Frankel to new Housewives cast members Jenna Lyons and Rebecca Minkoff—Saint John says the timing is a happy accident. "I began this brand way before I was in any conversation about the Housewives," she says. "But I would be ignorant to think a platform like that couldn't be helpful."
Saint John aims to distinguish her brand from competitors with attention to detail, like shipping wigs in reusable silk bonnets rather than plastic packaging. While she wants to own this category, she also hopes the brand's focus on its consumer leads competitors to improve the way they serve their customers. "I don't want to have to go on YouTube or Google and see 14 million videos of Black women and women of color kitchen chemists dying their lace to match their skin," she says. "My intention is that other companies will see the success of this one and will follow suit."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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