Hype Hair's New CEO Is Giving Us The Style Fix We All Need
Who doesn't remember showing up to the hair salon with a ripped out page from Hype Hair, ready to be transformed? The magazine has been a staple in salons and homes for more than 20 years, giving us edgy editorial spreads with the latest haircare and styling trends, and featuring our favorite style icons. We've seen Eve go from her platinum TWA to her signature braids, Monica go from her "Don't Take It Personal" precision cut to slayed extensions, and all the chic transitions of our favorite Real Housewives. We've also read stories about style trends and techniques from the industry's top stylists.
Today, the brand is set for a major refresh with its new CEO, Lia Dias, a Los Angeles native with her own personal connection to the haircare world. As founder of The Girl Cave LA, a growing chain of beauty supply stores with locations in California and Texas, Dias has always been someone not afraid to take risks and create the change she wants to see. Trained as a social worker and leaving the industry after not finding fulfillment, she took $30,000 in savings to start her first location.
It's been up and onward ever since.
Image by Ashli Brown
"I grew up going to beauty supply stores to get ready for the weekend, you know, on a Friday night," she recalled. "So it was just natural for me. I love being in beauty supply stores, but I always felt like I was never treated like a customer. I always felt like I was being treated with an air of suspicion. I wanted to create something that felt good for me. I'm from Inglewood, so [it had to be] something that felt good for my friends, my sisters. And so I started with the small store. April actually makes six years, and now we have seven locations."
Dias is adding to the growing number of black-owned beauty supply stores in a multibillion-dollar industry that's far from diverse when it comes to ownership. Seventy percent of the nation's stores are owned by Korean-Americans, yet African-Americans spend more than $600 million on personal soap and ethnic hair and beauty aids, according to a recent Nielson report. In other words, we buy a whole lot of products from these types of stores but we don't have a major share of the behind-the-scenes buying power, customer service protocols, community investment or influence.
Dias has been empowering other women in ownership via her franchise model, and several of her stores are female-owned as well. "My husband and I are franchisees of a juice bar called Juice It Up!, and I love the model. I love the support that the corporate office gives us because we knew what we wanted to do but we didn't know how to do it. I would have a lot of women come to me say, 'I want a beauty supply store,' and they'd want to know about how do I get started. I thought, well, why don't I expand the stores?" she says. "My goal is to have stores across the country, but the reality is that I'm a mother of three.
"I have a husband who has a career that I help him and support him through, and I have my own career and ambition. So I knew that I wouldn't be able to run retail stores by myself across the country. I thought about this franchise model and I said, 'This is the best way to [not only] expand the stores, but to also give people an opportunity to get into ownership without having to figure out this beauty supply model on its own.'"
With Dias's model, prospective owners must go through an application process, pay a fee, and invest to start their store. Upon approval, they are given the tools they need to succeed including access to vendors, how-tos on setting up their store, and information on how to run the business.
"We go through the interview process and we really see who will fit the model and make sure that their finances are in line with what it takes to run a store," Dias explains. "Then we approve people based upon their tenacity and what we feel like would be a good fit for the brand. It's [not so much] about how much money you have personally. We really are looking for the right family, the right person, the right partnership that will go well with what we're creating."
Image by Ashli Brown
Dias's venture into acquiring Hype Hair came about in the same strategic way she was able to expand the Girl Cave LA brand. She'd been interviewed for the magazine, and after building a relationship with the magazine's previous owners, she was able to step into the CEO role.
"I'd never get too excited when I have good sales months. I've always put money away. I didn't know what it was, but every time I had these good sales month, I'm like, 'Let me just put this money away.' So by the grace of God, when this opportunity came up, I didn't have to go to a bank. I didn't have to go borrow the money. I had it stockpiled from years of savings from my retail stores, so that when the opportunity came up and it was almost down to the dollar of what I had saved over the last few years, that was another indication to me that this was what I was supposed to be doing. I didn't have to stretch for it."
Due to its built-in audience, long-standing presence in publishing, and popularity in the haircare industry, Hype Hair has served as the perfect opportunity for Dias to get into something that has the potential to continue growing in spaces she's passionate about. "I want to really give a more full picture," she adds.
"We're doing the same things—editorials featuring hairstylists and hairstyles that are on the cutting edge and inspirational—but the other thing that I'm really bringing to the magazine is I want to infuse more of the culture into it."
"We're talking about a lot of women who are in the hair industry and telling their stories because I feel like those stories are powerful, too," she adds. "A lot of the stories that we're telling, we're making sure that we tell them very boldly. We're giving a lot of color. We're giving a lot of things that grab people's attention because this is a digital magazine and what comes down to it is the clicks and impressions. We want to provide useful, meaningful content."
For more of Lia, follow her on Instagram.
Featured image by Joseph Ford/Gifted Mindset
Beyond Burnout: Nicole Walters' Blueprint For Achieving Career Success On Your Own Terms
Nicole Walters has always been known for two things: her ambition and her ability to recognize when life’s challenges can also double as an inspiring, lucrative brand.
This was first evident more than a decade ago when she quit her job as the corporate executive of a Fortune 500 company during a Periscope livestream. “I’m not sure if there’s an alignment of [our] future trajectory. I’m going to work for myself. I'm promoting myself to work for myself,” she said at the time before flashing a smile at the viewing audience. As she resigned on camera, a constant stream of encouraging messages floated upwards on the screen.
By 2021, she’d fashioned her work as a corporate consultant and her personal life with her husband and three adopted daughters into a reality show, She’s The Boss, for USA Network. This year, she released the New York Times bestselling memoir Nothing Is Missing, written as she was in the process of getting a divorce and dealing with her eldest daughter’s struggles with substance use.
Convinced that there’s no way the 39-year-old has achieved all of this without intentional strategic planning, I asked her about it when we spoke less than a week before Christmas. I’d seen videos on social media of her working on 2024 planning for other brands, and I wanted to know what that looked like following her own year of success.
She listed a number of goals, including ensuring that the projects she takes on in the new year align with her identity “as a Black woman, as an African woman, as a mother, as someone who has lived a [rebuilding] season and is now trying to live boldly and entirely as themselves.” But, I was shocked by how much of her business planning also prioritized rest.
Despite the bestselling book, a self-titled podcast, and working with numerous corporations, Walters said she’s been taking Fridays off. This year, she doesn’t want to work on Mondays, either.
“A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement,” she said, noting that she’ll check in with herself around March to see how successful this plan has been. The goal, Walters said, is to only be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays by sometime in 2025. “It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to have happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change.”
"A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement... It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change."
Walters said the decision to progressively work less was partially in response to her previously held notions about her career, especially as an entrepreneur. “When I first started, I thought burnout was a part of it,” she said. “What I didn’t realize is that even if you’re able to bounce out of burnout or get back to it, there’s a cumulative impact on your body. If you think of your body as a tree and every time you go through burnout, you are taking a hack out of your trunk, yes, that trunk will heal over, and the tree will continue to grow, but it doesn't mean that you don’t have a weakened stem.”
But, the desire for increased rest was also in response to the major shifts that occurred three years ago when she was experiencing major changes in her family and realized her metaphorical tree was “bending all the way over.”
Courtesy
“One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity,” she added. “That is some language that I think is just now starting to really get unpacked.” In recent years, there’s been an increased awareness of achieving balance in life, with Tricia Hersey’s “The Nap Ministry” gaining attention based on the idea that rest, especially for Black women, is a form of resistance. Even online phrases such as “soft life” and “quiet quitting” have hinted at a cultural shift in prioritizing leisure over professional ambition.
"One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity."
If companies are lining up to consult with Walters about their brands and products, then women have been looking to her for guidance on starting over since she invited them to livestream her resignation 12 years ago. As viewers continue to demand more from content creators in the form of intimate, personal details, Walters has navigated her personal brand with a sense of transparency without oversharing the vulnerable details about her life, especially when it comes to her family.
The entrepreneur said she’d been approached to write a book for several years and was initially convinced she was finally ready to write one about business. “I started to do that, and then I went through my divorce. When that happened, I said, why would I write a book telling people to get the life that I have when I’m not sure about the life that I have,” she said.
Instead, she decided to write Nothing Is Missing and provide a closer look at her life, starting with being born to immigrant Ghanaian parents (“You need to know my childhood to know why I’m passionate about entrepreneurship.”) through the adoption of her three daughters and eventual divorce. Despite her desire to share, however, she said she felt protective of the privacy of her family, including her ex-husband.
When discussing this with me, Walters said she was reminded of a lesson she learned from actress Kerry Washington, who released her own memoir, Thicker Than Water, just a week before Walters’ book release. Washington’s memoir grapples with family secrets, too, specifically the fact that she was conceived using a sperm donor and didn’t learn about it until she was already a successful TV star. While Washington reflects on how the decision and subsequent deception impacted her, she’s also careful to hold space for her parents’ experiences, too. “A lot of things she said was that she had to recognize where she was the supporting character and where she was the main character,” Walter said.
This is something Walter worked to do in Nothing Is Missing when discussing her daughter’s struggles with addiction. “I was very intentional about making sure that I did not reveal more than what was required,” she said. “If I say something about someone’s addiction, I don’t need to go into the list of the substances they used, how they used them, what I found. [I don’t need to] walk into a room and paint a picture of what it looked like for people to understand.”
Walters said some of the most vulnerable moments in the book barely made a ripple once it was released. She was extremely nervous to write about getting an abortion, she said. But no one has asked her about this in the months since the book was released. Instead, people have been more interested in quirkier revelations, such as the fact that she once appeared on Wheel of Fortune.
“I have bared my soul about this thing I went through in my youth that has changed me for people, and people are like, ‘So how heavy was the wheel when you spun it?’” she said, chuckling. “It just goes to show that people never worry about the thing that you worry about.”
With the success of Nothing Is Missing, Walters said she still isn’t planning to release a business book at the moment. But, as she navigates parenting a teenager and two adult children while also navigating a relationship with her new fiancé, Walters said she believes she has at least one or two more books to write about her personal journey. “There is sort of an arc of where my life has gone that I know I’ve got something more to say about this that I think is important, relevant and necessary,” she said.
In just three years, Walters’ life has undergone a major transformation. There’s no telling what the next three years will have in store for her, but it seems likely she’ll retain an inspired audience wherever life takes her.
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3 Ways To Jumpstart Your Financial Goals In 2024 According To This Financial Literacy Entrepreneur
With every new year comes new goals or resolutions that people want to accomplish, and usually, they fall in either the fitness/ health category or the finances category. When it comes to financial goals, USA Today reports that 55.70% of people are saving for a rainy day, followed by 52.90% of people saving for retirement, and so on. To hit those goals, budgeting comes into play. However, it can be hard to know where to start. Ebony Beckford of Fin Lit Kids created a financial literacy platform for kids and parents who want to teach their kids about the importance of the dollar. After becoming a mother, the entrepreneur was inspired to give her daughter Madison a head start by teaching her about financial literacy, which was something that she wasn’t exposed to in her childhood.
“My mother passed away when I was 18, and my sister had passed the year before her. And my sister had three small children and I obviously was pretty young myself. And so when I got pregnant with my daughter Madison in 2019, I started to reflect on that period in my life where I was trying to figure out the world without any adult supervision,” she tells xoNecole. “And I started to reflect on like, the things that I wish I would have known and could have done differently. And at the core of all of my issues following the death of my mother and my other family members really was that I didn't have money. It was economics.”
That’s why it was important for Ebony to build Fin Lit Kids because educating people while they are young is the best way to change the landscape and mindset surrounding wealth in our communities. However, you can still get a jumpstart on your financial goals today through three key things, and Ebony explains how below:
Ebony Beckford with her daughter Madison.
Photo courtesy
Budgeting
Oh, budgeting. Some people love it, others despise it. But if you want to meet your financial goals, this is usually the first step, no matter your lifestyle. “It goes back to our values. Figuring out what matters to you most, right? Obviously, we have the essentials that we need to focus on. So pay your bills first. Get the things you need first, but after that, you have to ask yourself, what do you value?” She says.
“Because, like I know, people say, have your emergency fund. Which is important. And I know people say investing, but I think understanding what that means to you. So, investing for me right now is building my business, right? It's not necessarily investing in the stock market, which I do have that, right? But it's figuring out what is going to get you through the next year, right? And then the next year.”
Changing Your Mindset Around Money
Another reason why people may struggle with meeting their financial goals is due to having a negative mindset about money. It can be due to a number of things such as your upbringing. “I grew up in the Bronx. I grew up poor, and I considered myself to be just a poor girl from the Bronx for years after I had built a life for myself. So that was completely different, right? So, I started to realize me and like being poor became a part of my identity,” she shares. “I wasn't walking around being fabulous or not even wanting to be seen because my identity was a poor girl. So I had to do a lot of work within myself to be like no girl, you, your parents, the circumstances that you know your parents were feeling when you came into the world has nothing to do with who you are and what you come from. You come from so much.”
Investing in the Future
Fin Lit Kids tagline is “restoring generational wealth” and one of the ways Ebony suggests people do that is by investing in their kids with not only money, but time. “I think a lot times because of the things that have been done to us it feels like we come from nothing, but we come from immense wealth. And so what we're doing now is not building generational wealth we're restoring it and the key way to restore it is financial literacy,” she suggests.
“And so I think what people, I don't want to say doing wrong, but I think there's a hyper focus on assets, right? Building and creating and generating assets. And so you have parents who are super focused, they're working like crazy. They're not available to their kids because they're trying to make enough money to pass it on to the kids. And then they pass it on and their kids, they blow it. They don't know what to do with it. And so I think people when thinking about building generational wealth, we have to also understand that like financial literacy is a key component of that, as well as the time that we spend with our kids and investing in them and making them understand what our values are and why things are important.”
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Feature image by PeopleImages/ Getty Images