Taryn’s story: building brands and creating community

Taryn Gill’s holding company, The Perfect Lab Pty Ltd., builds brands in the curly hair, health, and beauty spaces. Digital tools have always been a core part of her brand development process, connecting her to her target audiences so that she can make products with their needs in mind. With support from our Road to Growth programme, she pushed herself to enter new digital spaces and expand her online community.

“I cut my teeth in media – specifically newspapers, magazines, publishing, and creating print solutions. It was a wonderful space to get in touch with that Black female perspective, how she was spending, what she was consuming. Having acquired so much knowledge, and really understanding from a research perspective what the African black female was doing, the hair space kind of found me.

I’ve been a naturally curly girl my whole life, even when it wasn’t cool to be curly. I knew so many women who had beautiful curls, but who struggled to find the right product to care for them. Despite African women being a massive consumer demographic, you could hardly find anything that was made specifically for our hair types in stores. It didn’t make sense.

Launching a business that catered specifically to African women’s curly hair was daring, as so few had gone before us, but I felt confident that it would pay off. My business was one of the pioneer curly hair brands to go to market. I am so glad we entered when we did, because now the industry is booming! It’s responsible for billions of rands worth of retail trade.

Believe it or not, we were also early adopters of digital tools like social media! Social media was still quite a new concept back then, but using it was a natural progression for us because that’s what our target audience was doing. African women were getting together in YouTube and Facebook communities, sharing how their views of themselves and the products they were using were evolving. They were moving towards a more natural look, embracing their natural curls, and celebrating their true selves!

Digital platforms helped us build a community where each consumer could have a voice, own her space and be safe to say whatever she felt like. It allowed brand developers like me to connect with consumers and plug into those conversations, so that I could develop products with them in mind.

As an entrepreneur, you are not plugged into a big corporate where you have lots of benefits and learning resources. You have to constantly remind yourself to step outside of the business and gain a bit more of an eagle’s eye view. You have to be intentional about seeking opportunities to learn new things. That’s why I joined the Road to Growth programme.

Road to Growth came along at a perfect time, when I was pivoting to build more brands from scratch. It gave me a chance to sit still and refresh myself on the key foundations for building brands. The programme brought me right back to the drawing board, supporting me to set goals, put a strategy in place, and develop a digital and financial plan for a new set of brands. It was a wonderful way to get back into the boardroom and do the thinking and the planning before the implementation. 

Once I got into the Road to Growth programme, I started harnessing more digital tools to add to my social media bouquet. I’d already seen our brands grow from Facebook communities into other spaces like Instagram, but the programme supported me to lean deeper into TikTok, migrate from PowerPoint to Canva, and explore ways of using AI. The beauty of programmes like this is that they encourage you to push beyond your comfort zone and enter new spaces in the digital world, so that you can grow your expertise.

Another fantastic benefit of Road to Growth is that it gives you access to other women entrepreneurs who are walking very similar journeys to you. It reminds you that you are not alone. You have a network of women you can rely on.

One of the positive impacts that women entrepreneurs have, that we don’t often speak about, is that we quietly play a role model to other women and young girls. They’ll look at how we’ve found real purpose and real joy and real financial gain in doing what we love, and they’ll know there is no formula for success. They’ll see that with hard work, determination and grit, they can achieve anything.”