We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brigette Dean a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Brigette thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

I had been making a hair potion for my friends and family for a long time, a mixture of organic essential oils that I loved. We noticed that it worked for everyone in my life, even my husband Zack’s beard. Plus, the oils I used were multi-beneficial, benefitting both hair and skin, while delivering some aromatherapy benefits on top of that. Lavender and Rosemary and Peppermint, it was like a mini spa in every mist. We started calling it Hair Magic because it worked for so many things, even as a natural bug repellant funnily enough, or for soothing for sun burns, and so much more.

In 2016, my husband held an Entertainment Director position at a large venue in Gulf Shores, Alabama, so we moved from New York for his job, where we had been trying to pursue music & acting — key word trying haha. There were many positives for that move, we were able to work together as musicians at the venue & at large events, but at the same time, we began desiring something different. We dreamed about being creative or musical in our free time, out of joy, and not as our main source of income.

In 2017, I started to realize that I was making a lot of bottles of my Hair Magic, so we thought, “what if we really bottled this?” I designed the first label at the urging of my husband and our shared obsession with Shark Tank. We watched so many episodes of people putting their all into a business, and their bravery sparked something inside of us.

Everything about creating our company was truly DIY. I had a cracked, outdated iPhone 4 that couldn’t even run video editing software and no idea what we were doing, haha it was a wild ride. We just took everything one step at a time, we Googled for answers every time we hit a roadblock or got lost. We had to learn a lot through trial and error, and set backs were intense.

I started an Instagram account for our new company and made our website online, and we just put ourselves out there, hoping for the best. We would remind ourselves daily that everything starts at zero, and it’s ok to be at zero. It means every step will be forward, and in a way, zero is nice like that. I started making the first bottles of Hair Magic and sharing tutorials on instagram of how to use it. I made every bottle by hand and packed and shipped those orders from our living room, then eventually recruited my husband to help.

People were kind enough to order some of the first bottles & would honestly review and share about it online. The genuine word of mouth was so powerful to us as a brand new small business. I will never forget those first customers!! If only they knew how much their support meant to us, we used to literally cheer their name out loud in our apartment. Maybe they would actually be terrified if they knew how much we love them (haha).

After working on our company for about 6 months, Zack’s contract was up at work & we had a moment to decide. What if we went all in on our company, like the people on SharkTank who had inspired us so many times? So, we decided to try. We sold all our belongings, used that money to purchase and make our first big inventory, and we moved into Zack’s parents’ basement in a remote town called Sapphire in North Carolina. We had nothing to our name but 500 bottles of Hair Magic and our tiny car, but we were ready to make some magic happen. Pun intended, haha.

We gave ourselves 3 months to literally work all day, every day. We were in a remote mountain town, in the winter, and we ate, breathed and slept Witch I Love Your Hair. We made bottles all throughout the night, packed orders all day long, drove winding, snowy mountain roads to deliver packages before the post office closed, then we would create content, film footage, and edit those videos for online promotion, begin social media marketing, try to remember to eat a meal that wasn’t microwaved, and then nap for a little before making bottles again to ship the next morning!

We were able to grow the company enough to move out within those 3 months & we found our way to a small cabin, still in Sapphire, NC. We made a new product, our Face Magic, and we kept making bottles by hand, packing and shipping just us two, and we knew we had to change something if we wanted to continue to scale. Our hands would cramp from using the oil droppers over every single bottle & we knew we needed to automate in some way if we wanted to scale.

We actually auditioned for SharkTank at this point in 2018, to see if we could expand with the help of a shark. We made it through several rounds of callbacks but ultimately did not get chosen and we were back to square one — how do we make thousands of bottles of Hair Magic without our hands falling off?

We researched and found a co-packing plant with the machinery needed two hours away in Asheville. When we began working with them, we were able to see thousands of bottles of Hair Magic made by a team of awesome humans & super cool machines, and not just my own hands. It was an incredible moment and there was lots of cheering and yelling/dancing.

In 2019, we finally moved down the mountain to Asheville to be closer to the witchy brewery, and we are now happy Asheville locals. When we are not shipping out freshly brewed bottles of Hair and Face Magic, Zack and I pursue our passion, creative projects, like we always dreamed of doing. We’ve also found so much passion & creativity in creating our instagram videos, it has a been a really great outlet over these years for us.

I recently wrote my first sci fi novel, “We Used to be Humans: The Blooming” and Zack wrote a series of children’s books called The Baxter Series, in honor of his family’s dog Baxter, who recently passed. Our books are available on Amazon, and self publishing has been quite the experience for us both. We had to Google many, many, many questions.

We also make music together all the time from our little home studio, sometimes uploaded to Spotify, sometimes parody songs for our friends, but always magical to us.

We also live on a river here in Asheville and we think we are professional paddle boarders now because we have been out about 20 times.

Brigette , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Our Hair Magic helps refresh hair & skin with a clean, cool peppermint feel.

What I feel separates us from others is that our products are also crystal infused! We have Quartz Crystal Chips in every bottle, so when you shake the bottle, the crystals mix up the magic! It also helps us avoid harsh chemicals to mix the ingredients. We also are vegan, cruelty-free, and completely non-toxic, zero silicones, zero parabens, zero fragrance, zero harsh secret chemicals. It is just a clean mixture of the highest quality organic essential oils available & it’s a way to love on yourself and your hair without harming your nervous system or body with harsh chemicals.

We say it’s Beauty Meets Aromatherapy because instead of false, toxic fragrance, our product smells aromatherapy level good while also nourishing and moisturizing your hair & skin.

Also, our Hair Magic works for all hair types, even if all the hair types & changes are your own! Over these years, I have had waist length wavy, brunette hair, a short, straight bob, I have bleached my hair, chopped it off, got bangs, grew them out, dyed my hair blue, dyed my bangs purple, dyed my hair teal, grew it out and chopped it again — and all the while, the only constant in my routine is our Hair Magic! I will attach a collage of all my different hairstyles from JUST THIS PAST YEAR, haha I love getting to experiment with my hair and our magic.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

A reminder I have to give myself before every post is: people will enjoy what I create & offer if I am just brave enough to share it. We often play out the possible negative responses or lack of engagement when we are creating, and that can really kill the creative spark. Playing out a positive scenario is a much better use of our imagination, and we can start to see whatever it is we are looking for — so, look for the good! Even if it’s just one view, or one positive comment, celebrate and enjoy it! And remember when you’re just starting out, don’t compare your first day with someone’s tenth year.

It can be really difficult to put yourself out there, to see your flaws or your not perfect videos or your low engagement. It’s easy to be hard on yourself and demand perfection, but someone once told me, people don’t want to see you be perfect, they just want to see who you. And I have seen in my own life, the times I am brave enough to just offer what I am & what genuinely excites me, those have been the best times of reception in my life. We all know what it’s like to push ourselves and want to be perfect, but if we can accept that we will NEVER be perfect, it gets easier and easier to let that goal go, and instead aim for what truly makes us happy or lights us up. Easier said than done, but worth it!

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

Any entrepreanur will tell you — there will always be hard days! But, there are also always good days. It’s less about “not having bad days” and realizing they are just the natural ebb to the flow you are about to experience. Whenever we have faced low times; surviving the pandemic, inventory out of stock, supply chain shortages, inflation — you name it — we always remember that it is still an honor to have a company to even worry about, that every problem we are facing today is still a forward movement we would have dreamed about in the past, when we were just trying to build a company to have at all. We try to look at our hard moments and not flinch away, but accept it, face it, and then still try to bring in the endless possibilities of how things could work out, better than we could have imagined. Sometimes, there has to be a bit of blind faith when you take on something like this. You have to almost be delusional in your belief in yourself and your dreams, but in a way, it’s the best, most painful feeling to try so hard at something that you care about deeply. We definitely lean on delusion in the hard times, but magic happens when you let yourself believe in the possibility of it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.witchiloveyourhair.com
• Instagram: @witchiloveyourhair
• Twitter: @witchiloveyour
• Youtube: Witch I Love Your Hair
• Other: Tiktok: @witchiloveyourhair

Image Credits
Brigette Dean, Zack Dean