A decade ago, the hair-care aisle and the hair-tech market were built almost entirely around straight hair. Tools, treatments and the language used to sell them assumed a single texture as the default, leaving the needs of people with curls, coils and waves to be met by word of mouth rather than by product design.
Dawn Myers has spent her career on the other side of that gap. TechCrunch profiles Myers and her work on making it easier to style, detangle and care for curly hair — a market that is large, loyal and, for a long time, badly served.
The problems she is addressing are practical and physical. Detangling is the part of the routine that takes the longest and hurts the most when a tool or technique is wrong. Styling depends on knowing how a specific curl pattern behaves, which is different for every head of hair. And care means washing and conditioning an amount of hair that straight-hair products were never formulated to handle.
The category has grown as founders who belong to it have built for it directly — a shift from products that treated textured hair as a variant of the standard to products designed around it. Myers's work sits in that wave, and the TechCrunch profile follows her approach to the styling, detangling and care routine as a whole rather than to a single tool.
The market logic is straightforward. Textured hair is not a niche, and the customers in it have spent years making do with products that were not made for them. A company that solves the whole routine — not just one step — has room to grow in a category that mainstream brands are only now learning to take seriously.
