As part of the Morning Lazziness series about empowering women who encourage and do incredible things with their ideas in society, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tiffany Rose Dean.
Tiffany is no stranger to hard work and meeting success. Raised by enterprising parents, her mother was a celebrity designer for such notables as Oprah Winfrey, Patti Labelle and Madonna, and her father, a successful entrepreneur who expanded and runs the family business. It was no surprise when Tiffany followed in her family’s footsteps and became a celebrity fashion stylist and costume designer.
In 2017, she left the glamorous fashion world and decided it was time to start her own company. With only $500, just enough to produce one product, Tiffany launched Hollywood Hair Bar with her now #1 regrowth product.
In just a few years, she turned that one product into a full line of hair and skin products with a sales revenue of almost $50 million. Today, Hollywood Hair Bar is a bonafide brand that has seen massive success, gaining hundreds of thousands of followers across social media platforms and was even highlighted as the top Black-owned beauty brand on Snapchat and Yahoo Finance.
The Dean legacy continues as Tiffany’s daughter, Milan, who is her biggest inspiration, is already developing a brand.
Here’s what we found out about Tiffany’s daily routine, followed by an exclusive Q+A.
Can you share the journey that led you to become an entrepreneur and the inspiration behind starting your own business?
I come from an entrepreneurial household. My mother is a celebrity fashion designer, and my dad is a businessman who ran my mother’s business. We talked about business every single day growing up. My whole life encompasses business. I went through an amazing boot camp working for my mother and father starting at 13 years old. Being an entrepreneur is second nature to me and something that was always destined for my future.
As a woman in the business world, what challenges have you encountered, and what strategies have you used to overcome them?
The most significant challenges I have encountered are men in this industry who take advantage of a woman’s place and do not give me the ability to run my business and different areas of my business. For example, in the marketing world, my voice was taken away from my ads as well as my SMS and the messaging and voice of my brand as it was run by a marketing agency. I had to fight to get my brand’s voice back and go to a whole other team so I could run my business again. I have worked in a man’s world the entire time I have been in the e-commerce and online stores industry.
How do you effectively manage the demands of your professional life while maintaining a healthy personal life as an entrepreneur?
I am working on that right now. It’s one of the hardest things to do because I am a workaholic, and I work 24/7. I have a 16-year-old daughter who I feel has gotten the short end of the stick lately because I have been overwhelmed over the past five years with this business. I have tried my hardest to spend designated time with her. The main thing we do to spend quality time together is travel a lot; those are the quality moments we have as mother and daughter. I am a single mother, and it is really hard to juggle it all, but I have an amazing child who really understands, and she has an entrepreneurial mindset as well.
What networking strategies have proven most effective in building meaningful connections within your industry?
The primary networking strategy is showing up. Attending events and conferences is so important. You can meet so many great people and making time to network is crucial as a business owner. Always take advantage of those invites.
How do you seek out mentorship, and what role has it played in your entrepreneurial journey?
I seek out mentorship with mentors who have been super successful in my realm of business. It’s been really hard to find that. I’ve reached out to a few brand owners, and they’ve looked at me like I was crazy because they feel like I have surpassed them with the sales I have garnered through my ecommerce store, but they are in the retail world and have really big brands. Sometimes, it’s really funny because I have surpassed them in sales and reach just by staying online, but they actually know a lot more about the industry and business in different aspects like distribution than I do, so it’s funny when I ask them to mentor me when they also want me to be their mentor.
What strategies have you found most effective for selling your products and reaching your target audience?
The main thing I did was share for share engagements initially. So, before I ever paid for a media ad, I did share for share engagements where I had someone else share my post, and I shared theirs. We looked at that as free advertising, and I did that for about 15 months before ever doing a paid ad. What that did was it actually drove traffic to my website, with about 100,000 unique visits a month for those first 15 months. That was the secret to my sauce that no one else did. That is how we were able to go from making $50,000 a month to the first month with paid marketing making $1,000,000 and then consecutively doing $2,000,000-$3,000,000 a month for two years straight because of the work I put in the beginning and the strategy I had finding my consumer. For everyone who came to the site to make a purchase, we doubled down on that audience and found more people on Google and Facebook who fell in that category. That’s where my secret to my sauce was.
What marketing techniques have you employed to promote your products successfully, and how do you measure their effectiveness?
I’ve spent over $25,000,000 dollars on paid marketing, and I will say that at this point in the game in 2024, going into the fourth-quarter, the main thing that you really need to do is focus on organic reach. Paid marketing is now a very lucrative business for platforms, and it may not be as lucrative for the marketer because acquisition costs are skyrocketing, and it isn’t as easy to scale on these platforms now. We have doubled down on TikTok, and we’re going to take over that platform because it is organic. They’ve created that to really work for you and target people who have engaged with your shoppable pinned posts. Which are like your ads on TikTok. The retargeting is free and all based on creators to whom you give commission. Yes, you can run some ads, but TikTok is an amazing platform for growth without having to deal with the 2024 fourth-quarter paid marketing gain at this point.
I measure effectiveness through third-party metric analytic websites like Triple Whale and Northbeam.
Can you describe a significant setback or failure in your business and the steps you took to recover from it?
In the beginning, after two to three years after we scaled, I had a marketing agency that started stealing my data and pixel data. They were running ads with my marketing budget and not sharing the pixel data with me. I was not able to retarget any of the people who clicked or engaged with my ads. They actually took that data and launched two supplement brands on my marketing ad spend, and it was a horrific situation. It took me about a year and a half to unravel what they had done. I am still recovering from that, and the recouping will be on the TikTok platform. I am really excited because that is where we are right now. I am still healing from this experience because it really affected my business as well as my mojo. But I’m here getting my mojo back.
What key piece of advice would you offer to aspiring women entrepreneurs who are just starting their journeys?
Research, research, research! Make sure you know what you’re doing and that you have the best product in your category to become a leader in that category. Also, you should work on your mindset because if you don’t believe that you can achieve massive success, you won’t be able to. I would first say to work on yourself and your mindset and know that you can do it. Researching and analyzing to dig deep into what is winning right now is so important. Do not just fall into the trap of the normal things that everyone is doing. Or something that might have worked a few years ago. The paid media world and the online world change drastically, so you want to make sure you’re always aware of what is happening right now.
Is there a specific mantra or quote that resonates with you and guides your actions as an entrepreneur?
If you can believe it, you can achieve it, so let’s receive it!
