She’s killing the game with a (hair) twist. Six years ago, Grace Eleyae started losing her hair because of badly-made accessories, and began to make her own. When she realized her cooler upgrades of bonnets and beanies could be a big business, the Northwestern graduate student invested in YouTube vloggers, becoming one of the first-ever CEOs to tap into the potential of beauty influencers online.

Now running her brand from California, Grace has expanded her line to include scrunchies, pillowcases, and hats lined with silk to protect your blowout and prevent breakage. We called her to ask about grad school, Etsy, and getting better hair.

Fill in the blank: running my own business during quarantine is different because…
Because I have to talk to my brother Emmanuel all the time, since we’re both staying at home! [Laughing.] To be fair, he kind of got me into this mess. When I was first starting to make hair accessories, I sold them on Etsy. I was just this little DIY shop. He said, “I think we’re going to sell 100 in a day.” I was selling maybe 1 a week, and he just [manifested] it. He said “100 a day,” and now we go up to 600 plus in a day. And he still teases me because he’s my brother.

How has the pandemic affected your company mission?
We’ve been really blessed because our products are so great for loungewear. It’s basically loungewear for your hair, right? Our vision is to make confidence look effortless. We create products that do just that. You want to go out; you have a fulltime job; you have a family… but you want to get up and go without having to worry about doing your hair. So our goal is to keep making more products like that.

In your experience, what happens when you get your products on YouTube influencers?
When we first started reaching out to women online, it was 2014 and we didn’t call them influencers. That wasn’t even a word to me. We called them, “100 YouTubers with a high following.” We cold-emailed 100 people online whose channels we liked and we got 3 responses. That’s it, 3. And the responses were, “No, not now, and I’ve never heard of your product, but go ahead and send it, just in case.” And we did, and that became our big break.

Who was she?
She’s a Canadian vlogger named CloudyApples.

Why do you think it took off when she talked about it online? Is her hair just, like, that good?
I mean, her hair is amazing, but what happened online is that people saw how the product worked. They could see why our caps were so great—they had the function of a bonnet to protect your hair, and the style of a beanie, so you could wear it outside and still feel cute. And you could understand why it was lined with silk—you need the silk for protection.

You were at grad school for journalism. How did it feel to be studying traditional media by day, and then going into the Wild West of the internet at night?
That’s a cool question. I think because Medill at Northwestern has an integrated marketing program and I was able to take a couple courses there, I could look at influencers in the beauty space less as “news sources” and more as marketers with a platform… We used to say, “With girls on YouTube, it’s like your friend recommending the product!” Of course, this was six years ago. There was more authenticity in the space. A lot of girls weren’t getting paid to recommend products, they really just talked about what they loved, and that was huge for us.

Grad school is a huge commitment. As a CEO who went to journalism school, are you glad you had that journey?
Absolutely. I’m so glad I went… What’s interesting is that I studied broadcast and documentary journalism, so even though I don’t work at NPR or anything, I do use those skills daily. I make our content; I storyboard our social media and our videos; I frame the narrative of who we are and what we do. And we’ll see. I’ll use [those skills] somewhere in the future, in a more targeted capacity, for sure… You can never regret being more knowledgeable than you were before, even if you don’t know where that knowledge will surface yet.

What book would you send as a gift to everyone in your life?
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. It changed my worldview. It takes away the excuses of “so and so was just in the right place at the right time.” There’s an ecosystem around success that can be measured, and this book helps explore that.

What podcast do we need in our lives right now?
I have a couple! I love Yvonne Orji! She’s hilarious… And How I Built This is great for everyone, but it’s especially interesting if you’re building a company when you listen to it, because almost everything the founders say, you’re like, “Oh, that happened to me, too!” You feel like you’re their best friend.