Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Carrie Sporer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Carrie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

My co-founder Meredith and I met back in 2007 while training for the New York City Marathon. We had signed up with the same charity program to secure our spots for the race and fundraise for a good cause. During training, we ended up logging hundreds of miles together and becoming close friends. After the race, we continued to meet up several times a week to work out and even added yoga and bootcamp to the mix.

While we loved the benefits of working out regularly, we agonized over how long it took us to get ready in the locker room. Since dry shampoo does not work on very sweaty hair, we found ourselves needing to wash and dry our hair nearly every day. We fantasized about a product that could clean sweaty hair more quickly, and we assumed others had the same need. After searching the market and coming up empty, we decided to make it ourselves and our first product, Showerless Shampoo, was born.

Our goal is to create revolutionary haircare made from safe, high quality ingredients for active people. We focus on products that multi-task and save time so you can be in the gym, on the mat, or wherever you break a sweat. We are incredibly proud to bring you SWAIR.

Carrie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Before launching SWAIR, I worked in Sales and Operations for luxury accessories brands. I really enjoyed the work, but was often traveling – I remember needing to get more pages sewn into my passport and it felt like such a badge of honor. After I had my first son and was ready to try to get pregnant again, I decided to leave an in-house job and start my own consultancy. Working in the “gig economy” was becoming more common and I wanted to stop traveling and be able to have a more flexible schedule. During this time I met a lot of small business founders that were making all types of products. Few of them had a background that was relevant to their current line of work and that inspired me to take the leap to create haircare products even though I knew nothing about the chemistry involved or how the business side worked. Probably the most important thing I learned was just to ask questions. People that we work with for all parts of the business are very happy to share their expertise and know that SWAIR’s success has a lot of upside for them too. We launched in September of 2020 with Showerless Shampoo and added SweatShield to the line in July 2022. SweatShield is a leave in conditioning product that protects the hair from sweat, humidity and environmental stressors. We also have a lot more product ideas and are working out how to fund the next phase of our business to make that happen.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

SWAIR almost ended before we even got started. We had worked on the formula for eleven months, created the logo and brand assets with a graphic design firm, purchased all of the packaging, created the website and secured launch-day press. All of these efforts took several months and most of our starting capital. Just a few days before our first production run was ready to ship to the warehouse, we were notified that there was a contamination in the lab and they had to dump 5,000 of our 6,000 bottles. It was heartbreaking! My immediate reaction was just to give up, but this situation became the first of many times that I was truly grateful to have a co-founder. Meredith and I were able to regroup and reframe the issue as a challenge that would help us sharpen our entrepreneurial skills and not a false start. Fortunately, the lab took responsibility for the contamination and reimbursed us for the lost product. We had to scour the internet and make a lot of phone calls to quickly get new packaging materials and labels. We were so embarrassed to tell the editors what had happened and assumed they would not longer publish their launch announcements and reviews of Showerless Shampoo. Luckily, they told us not to worry and that launches get pushed back all the time for countless reasons. That was a huge relief! We ended up going live on our website about 6 weeks later than planned. It was a bumpy start, but the mishap taught us how resilient we can be, and it has served us well since.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Building a social media audience is definitely a huge challenge for a new brand. We were certainly naive in how difficult it would be, and it is something we work on daily. In addition to have a sizable audience, you need an engaged audience if you really want to spread your message. A few things that have helped us are creating video content to trending sounds, giveaways with other brands and/or influencers, and posting a lot of polls and questions in our instagram stories.

It is no surprise that video content is more effective than still pictures on social media. We try to post a video to a trending sounds on Instagram Reels and TikTok several times a week and the effort has really paid off. The algorithm and trends change so quickly that you really just need to keep posting and hope something “takes off.” We have had videos get nearly 150k views, others that totally bomb and everything in between, but the consistent content and occasional viral moments have helped to grow our audience over time. We have found that with videos, more is more!

Partnering with other accounts for giveaways has also been meaningful in getting more followers. We tend to be pretty simple in our methodology – we find another complementary brand or two as partners, and each giveaway some product so that the winner will get a prize that is a few hundred dollars in value. There is always a rule that to enter you must follow all of the brands. Some people make it more complicated and ask entrants to tag multiple friends, save the post, etc. but we find that the more rules, the fewer new followers. As soon as we have the new followers, we normally do some educational posts about the product and reintroduce ourselves as the founders to catch them up on our brand. Our best giveaway was in partnership with a professional track runner. She had a big race coming up and told her followers to comment with their prediction of what her finish time will be and follow @swairhair. The person who came the closest to her actual race time won a bunch of free products from us. We gained several hundred new followers from that one.

Finally, once you have the followers, you need to make sure they are actually seeing the content you are putting out. The best way to stay on top of their feed is to have them regularly interact with your brand. We find that doing quick, fun surveys and questions usually gets people clicking on our Instagram stories. We have seen other brands do informational posts or stories and recommend that their followers save the post – this is another great tactic to master the algorithm.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.swairhair.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swairhair/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swairhair/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLGW3UWlj7WAzsFNUDBPTgg
• Other: Tik Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@swairhair