CURVE SALON UPDATE-anyone see this?

antoine

New Member
According to the naturallycurly article below, it looks like Curve Salon is expanding both its location AND its product line.

http://www.naturallycurly.com/curlmart/marketplace.php







Our featured Marketplace merchant:
Miss Jessie's

By Michelle Breyer
Over the past three years, Miss Jessie's products have become a staple for countless women with curly and kinky hair.

Using customer feedback, as well as experience in the famed Miss Jessie's Salon in Brooklyn, the company this month is dramatically expanding the line with four new products, as well as a variety of new sizes.

"When you have a product on the market, you get a tremendous amount of feedback from people," says Titi Branch, one of the founders of Miss Jessie's Salon and the product line. "You'd be foolish not to listen."

The new products include Rapid Recovery Treatment, Stretch Silkening Cream, Quick Curls Weightless Spiraling Cream and an unscented version of the popular Curly Pudding.

The Rapid Recovery Treatment is an intense treatment loaded with avocado cream oil and shea butter for people with dry, brittle curls.

"If you want to be a serious contender in the curly hair market, you have to have a deep conditioning treatment," Branch says. "It goes to the heart of the challenges people with curly hair have."

Stretch Silkening Cream is a moisturizing cream that helps elongate curls, using aloe polymers and sweet almond oil.

"It's great for people who have shrinkage issues," Branch says. "It produces a stretched-out, hydrated curl."

Quick Curls is a lightweight styling product that produces a supple, frizz-free curl. It contains ingredients such as ginger flower, lime fruit, lavender and nettle extracts and protein.

The Silkening Cream, Rapid Recovery Treatment and the existing Curly Pudding, Curly Meringue, Curly Buttercreme and Baby Buttercreme -- now only available in 16-ounce jars -- all will be available in 2-ounce and 8-ounce jars, and the Quick Curls will be available in two different-sized tubes.

"More than anything, our customers have told us they want something they can throw in their bag and go," Branch says.

The expansion of the product line comes as Miss Jessie's Salon moves into a new, larger location in Brooklyn. Much has changed since the salon got its start in 1997 as Curve Salon -- the brainchild of sisters Titi and Miko Branch. Born to an African-American father and a Japanese mother, their hair was a combination of textures. When they went to salons catering to kinkier hair textures, the stylists were only interested in chemical relaxing and other forms of straightening. Salons catering to straight hair were at a loss of what to do with the sisters' textured hair.

They wanted to open a place that allowed curly girls to feel they had more options than "a sopping wet ponytail brushed into a bun or the Rosanne Rosanna Danna blunt cut that puffs into a pyramid."

"We wanted to create a place where we could offer solutions to people with curly, textured hair," Branch says.

This market, she says, often has traumatic experiences at salons with no experience cutting, styling and coloring naturally curly hair. The goal with Curve, she says, was to create a place where people could learn about their hair and could get real solutions.

Branch says the salon is unique because the stylists have all been trained to work specifically with wavy, curly and kinky hair, and they use specific methods and products to work with these hair types. It takes a high level of expertise to work with curly hair, she stresses,

"You really have to be able to understand there are different types of curly hair -- and many curlies don't fit neatly into one segment," she says. "You have to be able to identify what they are and prescribe a method about how you're going to approach a style, color or chemical treatment. You have to have an ideology based on hair type and what you want to achieve."

The salon came up with specific solutions to deal with different hair types. One of the most well-known is the Silkener, a chemical service that makes curly hair more manageable.

"In recent years, people want to be curly again, but they want it to be a bit more predictable," Branch says. "Sometimes naturally curly hair is achievable only because you use a chemical to get it."

They also developed a cutting technique called the "Angle and Balance" method. The hair is blown straight -- "that way we can see the density, the shape and the condition of the hair" -- and it is cut very precisely.

"It allows us the opportunity to impose a real shape on the hair," Branch says.

Four styling techniques also were developed at the salon: Shingling, which removes the bulk; the coil-out, which tweaks the shape of the curl; the twist-out, which produces curl formation by twisting the hair; and finger styling, in which products are applied in a particular way to promote smoothness.

Branch says Miss Jessie's Salon will begin offering training this year to stylists who want to learn these signature methods.

The products were a natural outgrowth of the innovation taking place within the salon.

"When we started the salon, there were very few curly products on the market," Branch recalls. "We mixed stuff up because there was no one thing available that solved all the issues and challenges of people with curly hair."

They linked up with a chemist with a wish list of what they wanted their products to do. The formulation process took several years, and they launched the Miss Jessie's line in 2004. Over the last three years, they have been taking what they've learned to come up with the right additions to the line.

"We're focused on coming out with products that really, really work," Branch says. "Having eight solid products makes more sense than coming out with products just for the heck of it."

Through the products and salon, Branch believes she is helping address the biggest challenge of curly and kinky hair: unpredictability.

"That is the reason that a whole curly hair market segment has developed," Branch says. "People have no idea how their hair will behave at any given time. This whole niche industry developed because people want predictable results."
Miss Jessie's products are available in CurlMart.
 

XXXtacy

New Member
It was great to post about their plans since they have hush hush about their plans. Good luck to them. I wonder if they will decrease their prices?? Wishful thinking.


Wow!!! It is still only one sister featured. I hope this business didn't come between them.
 

naijamerican

Well-Known Member
Thanks a lot for posting this information! I am eager to see their new products.

I did the buy one, get one free thing in January and purchased the buttercreme. The first time I tried it I think I had a bit of an allergic reaction or something and it made my scalp really itchy (and I had just washed and conditioned my hair). But I used it again today and it is truly one of the very best treatments for my hair. I don't appreciate paying $58 but sometimes a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do... and not eat for a couple of days to make up for the expense! :lol:
 
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