As a fourth-generation entrepreneur, Risa Barash knew a good idea when she came across one. In 1999, at the Fairy Tales Hair Salon in Long Island, New York, a clever homemade product preventing head lice was in high demand from local parents. Barash – a stand-up comedian at the time – and her then-husband, Co-Founder Robert, were transfixed.
It made perfect sense – there were plenty of lice treatment products already out there, but rather than focusing on the cure, was it not better to focus on prevention?
“That’s when the genetics kicked in, and I said, ‘Oh, I think I could do something with this,’” she tells The CEO Magazine.
“When we were in that salon, it was generating a lot of talk, and I realized that if you create something that parents don’t just want but that they need, you’re going to build a community.”
Listening to customers
Enter Rosemary Repel shampoo, the lice prevention haircare product, which was soon flying off the shelves.
Barash has always listened to precisely what her customers are after. Her first company, Fairy Tales Hair (the name an ode to the original salon), expanded its range of natural products for children from lice prevention to include other pain point products, such as detanglers, after-sun care and curly-hair-specific hair care, and more recently, TBH (to be honest), a skin and haircare brand, catering to pre-teens.
Realizing that standard shampoos weren’t able to eradicate hair and scalp greasiness caused by hormone changes during puberty, as demonstrated by her then 13-year-old son, Barash began investigating how different clean ingredients could help mitigate the issue.
“It really started with my own kids,” she explains of the creation of her second brand. “They grew up with the business, and I was watching them grow up.
“It was this light bulb moment where it was like, ‘Oh, my kids’ needs are changing, my customers’ must be as well.’ And we have built such customer trust through the years that it was just a natural evolution to keep them in the Fairy Tales family.”
“It was this light bulb moment where it was like, ‘Oh, my kids’ needs are changing, my customers’ must be as well.’”
Once again, by identifying a genuine gap in the market, Barash was able to make a product that parents couldn’t wait to get their hands on. Today, the TBH range spans face cleansers, body washes, deodorants, moisturisers and hair products, but Barash insists it’s never about following trends or expanding simply for the sake of it.
“We stick to our values. We are very in tune with not making too many things,” she confirms.
“If there is a real-life issue that a parent or kid is struggling with, Fairy Tales and TBH will be there to make the solution for it. That’s our guiding principle, and that’s what we stand by.
“If the product doesn’t fix a problem, we don’t make it. I don’t try to get too big and too fancy, but I also believe that I need to change and grow and be aware of what’s happening.”
Targeting parents and tweens
Not only knowing but engaging with her customer base – predominantly parents and later, the children themselves – has been key to Barash’s ongoing success.
“We were very cognizant that we needed to talk to both of them,” she explains. “So we did a lot of education for the parents, a lot of blog posts and a lot of customer surveys to see what issues they were having, with blog posts answering the questions.
“And then on TikTok and Snapchat at the time and Instagram, we really tried to have fun with the kids and just show them using and enjoying the product.”
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However, the world of tween social media can also be a tough place, something Barash discovered about a year-and-a-half ago.
“TBH started getting absolutely maligned on TikTok, which was kind of funny,” she admits.
But rather than be defeated by the undesirable feedback, Barash saw an opportunity for growth and, more than that, an opportunity to strengthen the brand’s community.
“Our demographic had shifted, so we decided to change the packaging, as we were ready to grow the brand and appeal to a wider audience. We worked with Workshop Branding to create new, modern packaging,” she explains.
“We were already in talks with an agency to rebrand at this point, so we thought we’d have a little fun with it. Jimmy Kimmel has celebrities read out the mean tweets they get, so we did that. We did a couple of videos where I read them out loud, and they were awful!”
Barash even went so far as to reach out to some of the children who had posted negative videos to involve them in redesigning the new packaging. As a result, instead of a threat, she sees platforms like TikTok becoming a powerful, unfiltered channel for consumer input.
“If the product doesn’t fix a problem, we don’t make it.”
With an impressive ecosystem of partners and suppliers, such as Workshop Branding, which designs attention-grabbing graphic illustrations, by their side, Fairy Tales Hair Care and TBH are continuing to go from strength to strength.
And by cultivating an omnichannel presence, audiences on multiple platforms, in person and online, can all be targeted simultaneously.
“It has to be every business’ growth plan,” Barash says. “And we were lucky enough to sort of be omnichannel before most people.
“We have a huge Amazon business. A future-fit strategy really means that we need to be everywhere that the customer is. If they’re scrolling, if they’re on target.com or walmart.com, they’re going to find our ads there. If they’re on Instagram, they’re going to find us there. If they’re in store, they’ll find us in the aisles as well.”
Wise words
After 25 years of running her own, now multimillion-dollar businesses, Barash has no shortage of pearls of wisdom.
“I didn’t have an easy go of it and I didn’t have a mentor,” she says of the numerous challenges along the way.
“There was no road map for what I wanted to do because we never had any outside money. I learned to be quick with the decisions I needed to make. Trust your instincts. Take baby steps.
“You can make mistakes; you just need to have the conviction and the willingness to figure it out.”
“Saying ‘I don’t know’ is actually a strength, not a weakness.”
At the end of the day, Barash feels lucky to be doing something she still loves after so many years but is also adamant that when it comes to running a business, you never stop learning.
“I’ve tried to teach my team that success isn’t always linear,” she says. “There are going to be setbacks and issues.
“I always ask for advice. Saying ‘I don’t know’ is actually a strength, not a weakness. I need my team to be friends; I need them to respect one another. I also need everyone to laugh and have a good time – I guess the comic in me comes out.”
As a result, Barash has cultivated a warm and open company culture that encourages dialogue, collaboration and a little bit of her secret sauce: fun.
“I like to tell everyone, ‘Listen, I wish we were curing cancer. We’re not. We’re making hair care and personal care for kids, so let’s have a little fun while we’re doing it.’”
