We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mireille Liong . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mireille below.

Alright, Mireille thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

As most Black girls in Suriname where I grew up, I started to relax (chemically straighten) my hair when I was in my teens. The process was so normal that no hair on my head even considered that it could be damaging to my hair or scalp. The burning was just part of the process.

Then in my early 20’s as an IT student in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, my hair started to break severely. I had no clue why. Desperate as I was, I did everything the salons told me to do; change from a lye to a no-lye relaxer, deep condition my hair every week, going for a touch up ever two months instead of three months, to no avail.

I got in this cycle of growing my hair back healthy with box braids, then relax it again, only to have the hair in center of my head break down to my scalp again. When my boyfriend at the time said that I relaxed because I had a minority complex, I looked at him as if he was crazy. Not only was I offended but what did that had to do with the way I wore my hair?

One day when I stared at that balding spot in the mirror, I asked myself, am I really doing this because I have a complex? Can I stop this? Why am I doing this? Who am I doing this for?

What I did know is that I really didn’t want to depend on wigs or weaves for the rest of my life. What I wanted more than anything was my hair back healthy and happy. I really didn’t care what it was going to look like, as long as it was healthy it was going to be fine. That was the start of a long beautiful natural hair journey that brought me more than I could have ever imagined.

When I found out that I was far from the only one suffering from hair breakage. That in fact, 73% of Black women are suffering from what experts call relaxer induced alopecia, I decided to use my IT expertise to change this.

Digging even deeper made me come to the realization that Black people are the only people on planet earth who don’t have the human right to wear their God-given tresses natural which is the root of the problem while it’s never discussed. That is why, the goal of my social enterprise is equal hair rights.

WhatNaturalsLove.com is a blog and shop that advocates for equal hair rights. We offer hair care solutions that allow natural hair and locs to flourish, fashion that empowers individuals on a journey of self-love, and exhibitions showcasing the beauty of natural hair.

https://whatnaturalslove.com/blogs/bad-hair-uprooted/our-cause-equal-hair-rights

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Born the Netherlands and raised in Suriname, my very first book about African hair was published in the Netherlands in 2003. I just wanted to write the book that I was missing when I went natural and Uitgeverij Conserve was happy to publish it.

Since, I had no idea of how the book would be perceived as wearing your natural hair as a Black women was still controversial, I used my Master Degree in IT to built the website kroeshaar.com. The goal was to get feedback and stay in touch with whoever would be interested.

To my surprise the book was sold out within one month and women did not only talked about their hair, they started asking for products. So, I quickly turned the hair forum into a store which became one of the first ecommerce websites in the Netherlands.

When I learned that relaxer induced alopecia that made me go natural, didn’t only affect me but an astonishing 73% of black women, I made a conscious decision to use my IT expertise to create change.

With the ultimate goal to change the perception of natural hair, I self published Going Natural, How to Fall in Love with Nappy Hair and built Going-Natural.com, still the longest running natural hair blog.

To promote the beauty of natural hair I created America’s Next Natural Model, an online pageant that produced Miss Washington and a few influencers of which one purchased a home.

To literally paint a different picture of natural hair, I bought a camera and started capturing head-turning hairstyles that I turned into an exhibition and table coffee book called Bad Hair Uprooted, the Untold History of Black Follicles. Not only did I receive the Sankofa award for my work, the exhibition gained me international recognition from Curacao to Guadeloupe and Suriname.

WhatNaturalsLove.com brings all the above projects home in the form of a blog and shop for natural hair and fashion.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

In 2017, I was broke. Blogging wasn’t paying anymore and the margins on hair products were way too slim. I just didn’t know how to make a living anymore. i was really in dire straights. Desperate as I was, I was just writing another blog thinking this doesn’t make money, I really need to find something else.

The blog I wrote was about a dress, I had filmed almost a decade earlier at the African festival and the video was on my youtube channel. One of my followers asked yet again where she could find that dress.

I had no idea. I had written the vendor’s number on a piece of paper that I would never find so I just ended up writing a blog, help me find this dress.

I had a reasonable following on facebook so I decided to share the video and the blog on facebook well what do you know.: the video went viral instantly. Everybody and I mean EVERYBODY wanted that dress.

I didn’t sleep for 2 days then finally located the dress added it to the store and started selling the dresses before I had even verified that it was the dress. By the time I got the dress, I had sold $10,000 worth of dresses and I thought, if this is not the dress, I might end up in jail because, I won’t even have the money to pay the chargebacks.

Luckily for me, it was the dress. All of a sudden, I was in business again and that is when I realized, I needed to do more than hair if I wanted to make a living. So, that is how WhatnaturalsLove came to be the blog and shop for hair and fashion.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

For me it’s organic and email automation. I am a social person and I like to connect. I’ve also tried expensive SEO things and ads. I think I was pretty good at ads until I got hacked on facebook and their support failed to even respond. I just had enough.

To my advantage, I discovered that without doing anything, I had 2.5 M views on Pinterest, so I started to explore that. I started going through all my blogs, groups and followers on facebook and used all of what I had to create a stream of organic traffic and stopped expensive ads.

It looks like my store is performing even better now. I will go back to advertising but this made me realize that your foundation needs to be solid before you make that move.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://WhatNaturalsLove.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/whatnaturalslove
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/whatnaturalslove
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mireilleliong/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/mireilleliong
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@whatnaturalslove

Image Credits
Except the 1st one, all photos are taken by Mireille liong. the last two are from the exhibit Bad hair Uprooted. The 1st photo was taken by a photographer from Task Rabbit.