We recently connected with Jaclyn Gil Serchuk and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jaclyn, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Miribel Naturals actually started as My Soigne back in March 2018. I knew I wanted to start a business – but always thought I needed to have an unimaginable amount of money or some crazy never-before-thought-of idea. That’s what I was always told. I didn’t have either, so I never thought I could do it.

My (now) husband and I went to a business conference in 2017 and the speaker brought this up. He mentioned how everyone THINKS you need to have a crazy invention or a ton of funding to start a business…but you don’t. You just need to work hard and follow through. He went on to talk about how his wife made an extra 60k a year selling products on amazon, on top of having her full-time job. That was the moment it clicked and I decided I could do this too.

I went home inspired and decided to research selling products on Amazon, which led me to learn about e-commerce as a whole. It was like a new world opened up for me. I decided I could go slow to learn the ropes and do it on the side while working my full-time job.

I began trying to think of a product to sell and eventually decided to go with a microfiber hair towel. All my life people had complimented my hair and thought it was cool, so I thought selling a curly hair product made sense. Plus, I’d really use it and could authentically speak to why I loved it. That became my first product on Amazon, but in the spirit of growth and entrepreneurship, I decided I needed more than a product…I needed a brand. After much ingredient research, many experiments, and a lot of messes in my kitchen, I developed our first 2 products – the Creamy Hair Cleanser and Dreamy Hair Cream – and launched them along with the microfiber towel as My Soigne (now Miribel Naturals), a clean curly hair brand.

Jaclyn, 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?

I actually had no prior experience in the beauty industry before launching my business. I worked full-time in higher education as an international student advisor. I’d get off work at 4:30 and lived in a new city without many friends, so I’d often feel bored in the evenings. This boredom led me to do the research needed to develop my products and start my business.

Now, I own the brand Miribel Naturals and sell healthy curly hair products and accessories. Our products are made to help those with natural waves, curls, and coils embrace their hair. A lot of times textured hair care gets overlooked or we are taught growing up our hair is simply “bad” or “frizzy” but it’s really not. Our hair is beautiful. It’s just that textured hair has different care requirements than non-textured hair. We’re here to help others navigate through their healthy, curly hair journey.

I’m extremely proud of how the business has grown over the last 4 years. Everything we do, every product we create is a labor of love that takes years to develop. I don’t put out any product I don’t 100% use and back personally. I also don’t put out any product I wouldn’t use on my kids, family, or friends. Our brand is focused on clean, simple, vegan hair products that are concentrated with high-quality ingredients.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

I really like talking about how I funded the business because I think people often think they need a ton of money just to get started, and that is not true. I saved about $2,000 when I bought my first run of microfiber towels to sell on Amazon. From there I slowly bought ingredients, as I had the money, to use for creating actual hair products. It would be maybe. $100 here and $100 there. That was really it. I didn’t have an investor or bank loan. I used the income I had each paycheck after paying my bills to fund my business. I also began building a small following on social media before launching the business and, through social media, cultivated relationships with other micro-influencers.

Don’t get me wrong, there are pros and cons to self-funding, just as there are to raising capital. For me, self-funding was the only thing I knew how to do and it’s allowed me to grow slowly and organically over time.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

In the spirit of being scrappy, with not a lot of funds, I made all our hair products myself when I first started the business. It was the only way I could keep costs down since I didn’t pay myself for labor. Occasionally I would recruit friends and family members to help me fill jars of product, label the jars, or fill orders.

As the business grew. I went from making tiny batches of product (I’m talking 4-8 jars worth of product at a time) to buying an industrial mixer to make about 50 units of a product at a time. My whole house was taken over by ingredients, jars, labels, and the equipment I needed to fill orders.

In 2018 I found out I was pregnant with my daughter and realized my one-woman show was not going to be sustainable for much longer, so that was when I made the move to outsource manufacturing. I found a small, locally owned lab in my state and began working with them. They took all my recipes and adapted them to proper standards for shelf life and packaging compatibility (something I knew nothing about previously).

My first order from them was 500 units of each SKU, which seemed enormous at the time. I was so afraid I wouldn’t sell everything! And, the products came a month before my daughter was born.

I’m still learning best practices for this, but I’ve learned that the process of having a product manufactured the correct way, with proper testing, takes a long time! When making the product myself, I could whip out a batch and send it out to see how it performed in the market, but it’s a much bigger commitment to ordering thousands of units from a manufacturer. I think another practice I’ll instate as my business grows and I need larger and larger batches, will be to have multiple manufacturers who can produce my products at any given time. It can be a bit scary depending on one facility.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://miribelnaturals.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/miribelnaturals
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/miribelnaturals
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/miribelnaturals
• Other: https://pinterest.com/miribelnaturals