Manetaining’ Curly Hair
Two girls divided by geographies, age and profession, but ‘united by curls!’ Co-founders of Manetain Store, Hinshara Habeeb and Yuba Aga met each other on a WhatsApp group for curly-haired people. Habeeb is an auditor and Aga is a dentist by profession.
Both Habeeb and Aga spent years learning how to detangle, cut and style their natural hair. Finally, they discovered the Curly Girl (CG) routine and their life changed for good.
The CG routine helped them fall back in love with their natural, curly and wavy hair. This not only helped them feel more beautiful, it also helped them feel more confident.
Creating a brand
Habeeb and Aga now wanted to share this life-changing experience of self-love with more and more people from the community. They realised that most of the CG products were foreign-made and heavy on the wallet. They planned to create a brand that develops premium-quality hair care products made in India.
Manetain, a brand that helps women embrace their natural textured hair, took off in 2018 with heat caps and then launched silk and satin products. In 2021, the brand introduced its first line of hair care products - the co-wash and conditioner.
Sailing through Covid-19
From an initial customer base of a few curly-head WhatsApp groups, the brand has grown into a strong community of 10,000+ curlyheads!
Starting with Instagram, Manetain Store’s customer base was increasing day by day and became unmanageable, it moved into a website. “In the first year, we did business worth about 13 lakh and then in the second year, we did about 1 crore during Covid-19 and this year, we clocked 1.4 crore. We also got featured on Shark Tank season 2 and got funding from Aman Gupta,” Habeeb said.
The Shark Tank experience
Shark Tank definitely put this brand on a pedestal as the first curly wavy hair brand to be featured on the show and to go and tell the story and represent this entire curly wavy hair community was such a big win for the brand. Habeeb believes that the brand got enough PR to cover the South as well as the North of India. Habeeb comes from Kerala and Aga is from Bombay.
Niche is not a limitation
According to Habeeb, having a niche brand is not a limitation but actually, this is a very big misconception because even if anybody observes 10 people on the road, at least nine out of them have textured hair. She also says that these products are not just for curly hair, but are also for baby hair as well and most people in India find poker straight hair is actually very rare. So it’s about a lot of people who don't even know that they have wavy or curly hair and they think their hair is frizzy.
‘Manetaining’ worldwide presence
The curly hair method is a huge thing in the US, UK and other countries, and has so many competitors. “At present, Manetain Store is based in India, we do export to some countries like Malaysia, Dubai, and Qatar, but the majority of customers are from India. We are in the process of fundraising to expand it in global markets and have been bootstrapped for the last four-and-a-half years as well as into salons because, for anybody with curly, wavy hair, the touch point is actually a salon. So we're trying to educate the salon community about how to take care of curly hair, and make sure our products are available for our customers,” Habeeb said.
While other brands strive to straighten out the world’s problems, Manetain will always work towards making the world curlier, wavier and more natural
