Christelle Mombo-Zigah started taking machine learning courses in 2020 and went looking for the places the models were weakest, and she found one in the data itself, in how little of it described hair like hers.
She and Dr. Isi Idemudia built StyleMyCrown out of that gap. It is an artificial intelligence platform that lets a woman see a hairstyle on her own head before she commits to it, and its catalog carries 500 hairstyles and color combinations across textures from 3A to 4C.
“We really centered our platform around where we were seeing the biggest gap in the market,” Mombo-Zigah said.
The gap is not small and the money behind it is not small either. Black consumers spent $16.2 billion on beauty over the past year, up 9 percent, according to NielsenIQ, and nearly half of Black household beauty spending now happens online.
Online is exactly where a woman cannot hold a color up to her face, touch a product or ask anybody what a style is going to do on her texture. That is the problem the platform is built to answer, and it is why the two of them went to the data before they went to the design. A model that has barely seen 4C hair will guess, and the guess is what a woman has been shopping on.
They launched with 15 to 20 brands onboarded and visitors from 50 countries.
The second half of what they built is who gets paid. The platform is set up to carry Black-owned brands rather than route women back to the same shelves.
“We do believe in group economics. We do believe that we can be sustainable among us,” Mombo-Zigah said.
Two Black women trained a model on the textures the industry treated as an edge case, and then pointed the shopping that follows at businesses like their own.
