Angel Cornelius, Founder & CEO of Maison 276, joins ChedHER to discuss how she created her own beauty solutions right from her kitchen using plant-based, sustainable ingredients and why it's important to celebrate women of all ages and races.

Opening Bell

Celebrating Aging and Detoxing Your Beauty Routine

Mhm Welcome back to Cheddar brought to you by Jpmorgan Chase. The beauty industry generates over $100 billion 2022, there are still major gaps in the market. Our next guest launched her business because of her own frustrations and is opening up conversations surrounding aging in the beauty industry. Joining us now is Angel Cornelius founder and Ceo of mason 276, Angel Missin 276 started, we understand in your kitchen and has grown into a nationally recognized and distributed beauty brand, what is behind you know, your story of the business, the catalyst and then now the success of it. So, Good morning Alicia, thank you for having me Missin 276 is really the product of my over 30 years of frustration with the beauty industry. I've always been a bit of a D. I wire because I could never really find products that work for me. So I would buy things off the shelf and then I would add ingredients to it, whether it was moisturizers for my skin, but specifically for my hair. My mother discovered my first silver strand. So I grew up with the silver hair and understand the challenges of what it means to have silver hair and silvers and blondes or or hair sisters. So that was the personal problem that I was solving for just mixing products up for myself And around 10 years ago I decided to detox my entire beauty regiment as consumers. We were becoming a lot more familiar with the products, the ingredients that were in the products that we were using and having never really found things for myself that I could buy, I just began making my own and and researching plant based ingredients to solve for my personal pain points to that point. You were making those products right in your kitchen from plant based sustainable ingredients. What actually went into actually mastering your product though? So you know, I have this little book I call my little black book of failures because I kept these copious notes of everything that worked and everything that didn't and what ingredients solved the problems which ingredients didn't. You know, our hair is just like our skin, it changes as we mature. And so, you know, I wanted things to keep my hair and my skin moisturized without weighing it down. And when it came to my hair, I wanted it to have that same vibrancy and brilliance of my youth because you can have healthy hair at any age, but you just have to know what ingredients to use. And so that was really my focus uh specifically for my hair. You know, having silver hair is like wearing the same white dress every day, It gets just, it just gets dull and 99% of the products on the market for this category or what's known as the purple shampoos. But the problem is when you keep adding color to colorless hair, it takes on those hues and you get what I affectionately call old lady blue hair. And so I was creating this clean plant based product for my hair that didn't have the purple pigments. So I could keep my silver brilliant and bright. And while I initially thought I was a hair unicorn as it turns out, there are millions of women who say they have that same frustration and that is what prompted me to create the product that's now known as the Maison 2763 step system for silver and blonde hair. I love that. At the start of that, that uh answer you mentioned that little black book of failures because in so many business scenarios we don't realize you can fail 1000 times, You just have to succeed one time. Um to that extent, what advice do you do? You wish you got. You know when you first started your business journey, you know when I, when I first began interviewing and people would ask me about my journey, I would start off by saying, you know, I don't come from beauty and what I was doing was discounting literally decades of experience whether it's in corporate America, my experience as a wife, as a mother, a family, my community experience, all of that goes into what makes me who I am and why I've succeeded thus far. And so I wish I had not discounted the value of a lifetime of experience because all of those skill sets that I used in all of those segments of my life for decades. I bring those with me as the founder of maison to 76. And it is what has helped me build this amazing community of women of every ethnicity, every hair texture and type because that is really what we're doing. You know, I look at your product and I think about the reality that not many beauty brands celebrate women of all ages, women of all races. Why is this so important to your brand? And what should everyone know about beauty and about age? Well one beauty has no age and historically the beauty industry has segregated us based on whether that's hair texture or skin tone. And the truth is that we have far more in common than the beauty industry recognizes. And so, you know, the other issue is that middle aged women in particular, we don't see ourselves reflected in beauty typically they use women until they use young ladies like our daughters to try and sell products to us. And so what we do also middle aged women are approach from an age corrective perspective, right? Anti aging wrinkle reduction is though it's the industry's main function to serve us up products to fix everything they think is wrong with us maison 276 is built by the power of community because we represent men and women of all diversities, but also we represent middle aged women in a way that's authentic to who she is and how she feels and how she really lives her life. She's beautiful, she's vibrant, she still ambitious, she's athletic. And so everything about our brand encompasses the beauty vibrancy and energy of our community. I absolutely love your enthusiasm and the way that you express that, and I'm sure it resonates with so many women out there, really appreciate your time, the work that you're doing in your product, Angel Cornelius founder and Ceo of Mason 276. Alright, JPMorgan Chase is committed to increasing women's representation at all levels and empowering women to thrive in their careers. To learn more, visit JPMorgan Chase dot com slash W O T. M.