Bread’s recipe for success

When Maeva Heim opened her suitcase in her room in Colorado back in 2016, she was confronted with what would become a life-changing situation. During the flight from New York, the chemical relaxer she had used since childhood to straighten her textured hair had exploded, covering everything in the caustic liquid. As the Perth-raised brand manager surveyed the mess, she made a critical decision — she wasn’t going to do it any more. She was careful about the ingredients in her skin care, so it didn’t seem right to keep putting something on her head and scalp that regularly caused welts and irritation. But Heim had never worn her hair in its natural state and had no idea where to start. When she went looking for advice online, it was confusing. The products hadn’t evolved since she was a girl helping out in her mother’s Northbridge salon, despite data showing a ballooning number of women ditching relaxers, causing a 40 per cent drop in sales. Heim, experienced in cosmetics and skin care through years spent at companies including L’Oreal, had long wanted to create a beauty business for women of colour. It hadn’t occurred to her to do hair products, but the gap in the market was too big to ignore. Last year, her multi award-winning company, Bread Beauty Supply, supported and launched by Sephora, hit stores across the US. Months later, it was on shelves on Australia’s east coast and this week, Heim was back in her home town to see it in stock at Perth’s first Sephora store at the new Karrinyup Shopping Centre. It might seem like a whirlwind but Heim has spent years planning these moments, putting in heart, soul and a lot of thought. Even before she decided to make hair her focus, she was motivated by what she had seen — or not seen — working behind the scenes at global beauty companies. “I was behind the curtain, seeing the decisions that were being made, and the reasons why you see a certain visual and not others in-store,” Heim says. “It wasn’t just the brands that I was working on, but the beauty industry as a whole. I just felt like they weren’t really speaking to me and to women that look like me. “That’s when I knew that I wanted to create a brand that would fill that gap and be part of moving the whole industry towards this place where everybody felt included, where everybody felt like they had products for them that they could buy without having to hunt for weeks to try and find in some tiny store somewhere.” A hair range might seem like a natural progression for Heim, who grew up helping out in her mother’s hair salon, tucked into an alley near the State Library. As a girl she would take appointments, because callers often had trouble with her mother’s accent, then graduated to braiding and researching and importing specialty products. When she graduated from high school, Heim studied law and business; she had always wanted to be a lawyer but found herself drawn into the latter by the creativity involved in marketing. But part of her drive was always to help people and to have an impact. So as soon as Heim made the decision to start a haircare business, she wanted to simplify the laborious experience women with textured hair have long gone through to render their curls “acceptable”. The discussion can be fraught, even as the cultural movement towards embracing natural texture advances. “One thing about the way we occupy the space was ‘yes, cool, embrace your natural texture’, all of that, but we don’t want to be telling people what they should or should not do,” Heim explains. “We don’t want to be a brand that is saying ‘you can only do your hair like this’, because a lot of the discussion in the natural hair community is about that. You can feel a bit like ‘I tried to fit in and abide by all these rules by making my hair straight and now I want it to be naturally curly, there is this whole new group of people telling me what to do? It has to look like this, it has to look like that, you have to use these products and you have to lay your baby hairs and you have to do all these things.’ “And I was like, well, no. What if I want my hair to look fuzzy and big, if that’s what I like? What if I want to blow-dry my hair? What if I want to use my straightening iron? I still do all of these things and I don’t really want a brand to tell me that I’m wrong for doing those things. We started with products designed to help you with your hair in its natural state, but our future vision for the brand is that we’re just creating really good products and value for money for whatever you want to do with your hair.” Heim’s first product was Hair Wash, a conditioning shampoo (that smells like the milk from a bowl of Fruit Loops) and the first step in its simplified “Wash Day” routine, named for the whole day process women have previously had to undertake. Heim was painstaking with its development, immersing herself in research on innovations in hair care that could be applied to curly hair — but weren’t. She contracted multiple chemists to get the formulation right; she even did courses in cosmetic manufacturing so when she was told something couldn’t be done, she knew that, in fact, it could. She wanted clean ingredients, high performance, an affordable price and a product that could perform multiple jobs to cut down that routine. “Hair care is part of beauty and it should be fun. It shouldn’t stressful,” she says. But before she even had a product, Heim knew that she would need investment to create a brand with truly game-changing impact. Sephora, a trailblazer in inclusive beauty including Rihanna’s Fenty line, was undoubtedly the best fit. Then she read an article about Kardashian family hairdresser Jen Atkin, who had been given a “launch contract” to develop a haircare line, sight unseen. “I thought ‘OK, maybe I can try that’,” Heim laughs. “I want to get in front of Sephora and I want to get a purchase order before we’ve even launched a product for this brand. And that is what I ended up doing, although it took a couple of years.” Heim had fleshed out the concept of Bread — named because its products aim to be staples — and was working on it as a side hustle when she wrangled an invitation to a Los Angeles conference where she knew a Sephora vice-president would be. “I said ‘hey, I’m building this brand, what’s your advice for getting in front of a buyer?’ She gave me a card and said, send me your deck (presentation) and we’ll get it to the right person,” Heim remembers. Within 48 hours, she was on a plane to San Francisco to meet with a Sephora haircare buyer who could only spare 15 minutes on a Tuesday. Heim arrived early at the cafe where they were meeting and set up. The buyer was so captivated she stayed an hour. It turned out Sephora was very aware of a gap in its haircare section but just hadn’t found the right fit. They stayed in touch for a year, before the buyer nominated Heim for Sephora’s Accelerate program in San Francisco: a brand incubator program focused on products founded by people of colour. Bread was one of two brands chosen for Australia’s first cohort. There were interviews and video presentations, a boot camp and a demo day in front of 100 investors and industry representatives. The next day, Heim met with her Sephora mentor. “She said ‘we want to launch the brand’. This was before I even had a product. Then she said ‘and we want to launch it in six months’. And I was like ‘great, sure, yes’,” Heim laughs. “From then, everything went so quickly. Things that would have taken years just snowballed ... within the space of six months, we got the go-ahead, we got the purchase orders, we got investment, we got the products and we launched — during a global pandemic.” Despite the challenges of COVID, Bread thrived. Heim had planned to relocate to the US but decided to stay put, first in Melbourne and now here. She gets her emails and meetings done early to accommodate the time difference with the US, and has a small team based in Los Angeles to manage logistics. Her two-person marketing unit is in Australia. They’ve learnt a lot in this first year, including that their hair oil would become a bestseller for its popularity across hair types. The range now also has a conditioning mask, they’re about to do an Australian launch for their styling hair cream and recently went into scalp care. Front of mind, always, is how to achieve the desired results with as few products as possible. “Often with curly hair, it’s like you have to use 10,000 different products. But skin and makeup has really gone that route of simplifying, whittling it down to the essentials, so we try to take that lens as well.” COVID robbed Heim of the chance to see her products on US shelves but she is excited to see them in Karrinyup. She used to frequent the old centre as a youngster and could never find the right foundation, while her friends always could. It’s not lost on her that the shopping experience will look different for today’s girls with dark skin and curly hair. “I was at a cafe the other day and this girl came up to me, with just the most beautiful curly hair,” Heim says. “She asked ‘are you Maeva from Bread? I follow you guys on social, I love the brand’. I can’t wait for everybody like her to be able to go into Sephora and see Bread on the shelves. It would have been something I would have loved to see growing up.” BEAUTY BUSINESS It was 1970 in Limoges, France, when a young painter and sculptor, Dominique Mandonnaud, tired of selling soap at his parents’ store, decided to open a perfumery. His Shop 8 was a hit, centred on a revolutionary self-service approach, allowing people to test perfumes and make-up before buying, rather than the “buy and hope” approach. As Mandounnaud’s network of stores grew, backed by private investors, he decided to buy a beauty chain launched in France by UK giant Boots. Its name? Sephora. He rebadged and continued to expand , including opening a flagship store on the Champs Elysees, until Sephora was purchased by leading luxury goods group LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) in 1997. The reported €344 million sale gave Mandounnaud the chance to focus on his passion for sculpture, and under LVMH, Sephora started an aggressive global expansion, including its first US store in Soho the following year.Today, it is one of the biggest beauty retailers in the world with more than 2700 stores in 35 countries, a massive online store and a cult following. A champion of diversity, it’s home to Rihanna’s Fenty line, and other celebrity brands including JLo Beauty by Jennifer Lopez, Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty, Jonathan Van Ness’ haircare line, JVN Hair, and Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie, as well as its lauded Sephora Collection. Sephora’s first store in WA, which launched this week at the new Karrinyup Shopping Centre, has been on the company’s strategic road map since its first Australian shopfront opened on Sydney’s Pitt Street seven years ago. Sephora Australian and New Zealand general manager Beth Glancey says demand from the Perth market for a bricks and mortar store was “well and truly there”. Beauty is always relevant, even in a pandemic,” Glancey says. “Our clients still want to keep up their skin and hair routine, make themselves feel good with makeup and treat themselves ... As there continues to be appetite from our clients and room for growth, we will go after it.” While its “try before you buy” tester concept had been curtailed elsewhere during the pandemic, Glancey says it will be part of the Perth store and remains “at the core of Sephora DNA” as a reason traditional retail flourishes in the age of online shopping, along with the advice and “brand agnostic service from our team of beauty experts”.

Bread’s recipe for success

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