Deep in lockdown, singer and TV presenter Fleur East, 37, and her younger sister, make-up artist Keshia, 33, founded Kurl Kitchen, a haircare business based around natural ingredients sourced from Ghana.
It has been a monumental success, with the siblings’ products now stocked in Boots stores across the UK – and the pair now have their eyes on conquering the American market. But it hasn’t always looked so positive and their journey to success nearly reached a dead end after 18 months of hard work.
Here, as part of Metro’s partnership with the Black Business Initiative (BBI) showcasing black entrepreneurs, Keshia shares their story…
How did Kurl Kitchen come to be?
Not, to be honest, in the nicest of ways. In 2020 our father passed away suddenly. It was in March and four days later we went into lockdown. It was a very stressful, confusing, heartbreaking time. We had lots of friends and family obviously come and gather and surround us – and then all of a sudden, we were in total isolation, even from each other.
When you’re going through such extreme grief, you can reflect a lot – and we looked back on everything that he ever said to us.
He was obsessed with the idea of me and Fleur just doing something together. We’re five years apart but we got dressed up as twins, as kids. He just loved this idea of us working together. And we thought, ‘You know what, why don’t we do something for him, for his legacy?’
It was kind of like a passion grief project, born out of pain.
And it was also born out of the pain point of growing up in a dual-heritage household. My mum is Ghanaian. She grew up in Ghana. She came over to the UK when she was 20.
My dad was white English, so between the both of them, they just never knew what to do with our hair.
It was a struggle growing up. And in the end, we would chemically relax it, we would straighten it, we would do anything but actually nurture our hair – because we just didn’t have the tools, the education or the know-how.
So we thought, ‘How can we put these two things together, and make this change, and how can we do it together?’ That was how Kurl Kitchen came into being.
So how did you make it happen?
From the very first conversation, we knew it was going to be called Kurl Kitchen. And we knew that we wanted it to have ingredients from Ghana, specifically because we know how amazing these ingredients are.
Every time we go to Ghana, our skin looks better and our hair looks better.We went to Ghana to do some research. Obviously, most of the ingredients were going to be from West African influence.
And we found this formulator and she was very passionate about vegan, sulphate-free hair products. We knew instantly that she was going to be the right person for the project, and we began formulating the range with her.
We talked about Ghanian ingredients. We’ve got black soap, we have okra, we have baobab, we have wild yam, we have plantain… we have all these amazing ingredients.
And we said we wanted it to be rich and nourishing, but not heavy. She took our briefs away and we began.
What was the first product you made?
A leave-in conditioner. I put it in my hair and the curls were so defined and lasted for two or three days. It got us really excited. When we tried that product, we knew we were actually going to be able to do this.
So was that that – you just launched?
No, it wasn’t smooth sailing! We began formulating in 2020. That formulation process took about a year-and-a-half then we came to get the product tested in the UK. That’s when it went a bit wrong.
We didn’t realise that Ghana is FDA regulated, which means that they follow the American set of standards when it comes to cosmetics and beauty. When we got our cosmetics tested in the UK they failed. Every single product failed. So, we had to start from scratch again. It was devastating. A massive blow.
How did you pick yourself back up?
You know what, when you do something out of this much love and conviction, even an obstacle as huge as this can be overcome.
Some people might have said, ‘You know, we’ve wasted two years on this, we are going to give up.’
But I just called up my sister and said, ‘They’ve failed, and we have to do this again,’ and she was like, ‘OK, let’s do that’. It was as simple as that.
So when did things begin to take off?
Later in 2022, when we had reformulated, we began to have conversations with Boots. It was the first retailer we had approached, and we explained that Kurl Kitchen was our father’s legacy, our mother’s culture and nothing like anything on the shelves at present. And they were instantly, ‘Yes, yes, yes’. And so we launched in 600 stores.
And how did you fund all of this?
We self-funded –it was over the four years, so it wasn’t a massive chunk of money at once. The most expensive years were 2022 and 2023, but up to now it’s been our own savings and our inheritance. I think that a lot of black businesses are self-funded because, historically, we haven’t had access to peer-to-peer funding.
And it’s admirable to self-fund, but when you want to scale your business – like we do now – to potentially scale into America, the UAE and other markets, that’s when we need investment. That’s the next step for us, for sure.
How has the BBI helped you?
You know what, I think that everything comes at the right time. And I feel like with business, everything has to happen in stages.
If I’d met the BBI at the start of my journey, I wouldn’t have got out what I have from it. No one in my family had been in business previously and it wasn’t on the agenda for me.
I did a history degree at university. I thought I wanted to do art curation and work in museums. But we’re in a position now where we are ready to scale the business.
The BBI course teaches you a lot about how to do business, what things go on in business – I learned a lot about the psychology of marketing, which was new to me. And you can’t put a price on the value of building a network in your industry.
In terms of running the business day to day, what do you enjoy most?
There are so many things that I enjoy. I hated maths at school and thought I was never going to have a career in anything to do with finance. But what’s been nice is finding when you’re passionate about something, the things that you think are going to be challenging aren’t actually challenging at all.
But day to day, the most valuable thing for me is people saying that we’ve helped them so much, that they’ve never been prouder to wear their hair out. That is just like the most beautiful thing in the world. We couldn’t embrace our natural hair because of the lack of product. So, to hear that? It’s a full circle moment.
What about the hardest thing?
Wearing many hats is one of the most stressful things. We’re not at the stage where we can have a brand manager or someone who can take responsibilities for us. And I got married two weeks ago – I’ve been trying to run a business and plan a wedding. My sister has a two-year-old as well.
I think that’s the most stressful thing, running the business and still running your life.
What advice would you give other people who are going into business?
Resilience is the most important personality trait. If you don’t have it, build it. There’s always something – there’s always an obstacle, there’s always a mountain.
The biggest difference between someone’s business that’s successful and someone who just gave up after year two, is resilience. That’s the difference. You have to be willing to take blow after blow after blow.
What does your mum think? She must be so proud…
Oh, my God. I mean, my mum is sometimes lost for words at everything that’s happened. I feel like sometimes when you hit rock bottom, there’s a fork in the road and you can go one way or you can go another and there’s really never any telling which way you’re going to go.
I am just glad that it pushed us closer together as a family. It feels as though there’s something that has come out of it – and I think that that’s the silver lining.
With grief, I think if you can look back and you can say that you know that something wasn’t in vain, if you know that that dark time wasn’t in vain because something beautiful came out of it, I think that that’s all you could ever ask for, to be honest.
