Entrepreneur and business consultant Vivian Kaye, photographed in her Hamilton, Ont., office, bootstrapped her company KinkyCurlyYaki into a multimillion-dollar business.Kate Dockeray
Vivian Kaye was a college dropout working nine to five when she found herself unexpectedly out of a job.
She’d been working at several Toronto-area tech startups as a bilingual “Jane-of-all-trades” until she was fired from the last company in April, 2010.
“For me, entrepreneurship was a necessity, as opposed to a privilege,” says Ms. Kaye, founder and CEO of KinkyCurlyYaki, an e-commerce site that sells natural-textured hair extensions for Black women. “It’s something that I did as an immigrant, as a college dropout, as a Black woman, as a single mother.”
Identifying a problem and solving it
Ms. Kaye’s first step into entrepreneurship was to go full-time with her side hustle, a wedding décor business called Vivian’s Décor and Designs that she started in 2006 after helping one of her two sisters with her big day.
While building that venture into a six-figure business, Ms. Kaye encountered the problem that led to her next inspiration: a frustrating lack of hair extensions that looked like her own natural, curly hair.
“I wanted something that looked like my hair so no one could tell that I was wearing hair extensions,” she says. “So, I went looking for it for myself … I didn’t mean to start another business, but it happened.”
Ms. Kaye launched KinkyCurlyYaki in the winter of 2012 during the off-season for her wedding business (which she wrapped up in 2015). In addition to the challenges of starting and growing a business, securing a supply chain and shipping worldwide, Ms. Kaye became a single mom in 2014. Just two years later, KinkyCurlyYaki hit $1-million in revenue. She also hired her first employee that year – until then, her parents had helped her fulfill orders from the basement of her house.
“This is a woman who just figured out how to do it by doing it,” Ms. Kaye says of her journey to CEO. “E-commerce was still new to the average person. I just took some pictures on my little phone and put them up on the Internet and bought a domain and said, ‘Here’s my business.’”
Online referrals and bootstrapping
While the concept of influencer marketing through social media was still in its infancy, Ms. Kaye was able to leverage the power of Facebook groups and online word-of-mouth to grow KinkyCurlyYaki’s popularity. She says her broad range of experiences in tech startups and her unique perspective combined for entrepreneurial success.
“I understood the target audience because I was the target audience,” she says. “As Black women in the beauty space, we’re used to outsiders dictating how we should look, what type of hair [we should have], how we should look in the workplace, what is considered professional.”
Ms. Kaye says that one of the early difficulties she faced with her business was access to funding and resources.
“I’m an immigrant, so my parents didn’t have a network of people, friends they went to college with who had money and had inheritances and all that,” says Ms. Kaye, who came to Canada from Ghana with her parents in the late 1970s. “I literally bootstrapped my business from zero. I had no outside funding; I didn’t have any bank loans; I had nothing. I got to $1-million without anyone putting any money into my business.”
Now, she’s determined to empower other women to follow their dreams.
“I don’t want anyone to have to go through that, especially women and especially women of colour.”
A pandemic pivot
When the pandemic crippled her supply chain, which sources human hair in India and processes it in China, Ms. Kaye needed to find a path forward. Suddenly at home with a son in Grade 1 who couldn’t go to school due to pandemic-related closures, she threw herself into business coaching while caregiving for her child.
“Here I was running this multimillion-dollar business and now I have to stay at home and figure out how to teach one-plus-one, because he’s not learning it from the teacher on the screen,” she says.
Vivian Kay Consulting, launched in May, 2018, has become her focus over the past two years. She hosts a podcast on entrepreneurship for American Express and is a frequent speaker and media commentator.
Ms. Kaye is also a mentor and a member of the advisory board of Founders Fund, established in 2019 to provide funding opportunities and support for diverse entrepreneurs. “Founders Fund was a way for me give other women the leg up that I didn’t have.”
She says her goal is not to teach women how to start a business, per se, but how to be confident in themselves so they can “do the big things in life.”
“I just want to encourage women to have audacity and to ask themselves ‘Why not?’” she says.
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