GT alumna, Titilayo Funso, is tackling the lack of innovation within the beauty industry head-on
The global beauty industry is a field of explosive growth and development, with hundreds of thousands of new brands and products taking over drugstore shelves every single month. However, despite the rapid increase in numbers, the evolution of the cosmetic industry has demonstrated little to no innovation when catering to women of color. With limited ranges of makeup and skincare items, minority women have consistently faced difficulties receiving the suitable level of quality for their skin color and type.
Titilayo Funso, an Industrial Engineering (ISyE) graduate from Georgia Tech, took notice of this issue while exploring entrepreneurial course offerings at Georgia Tech.
While Funso was in her undergrad, she began taking courses for CREATE-X, a Georgia Tech initiative aimed towards instilling entrepreneurial confidence in students and empowering them to launch real startups. She enrolled in a CREATE-X program called “Idea to Prototype,” in which students receive faculty mentors, seed funding and additional university resources to build functional prototypes of their ideas. During this process, she was guided through prototyping, wire framing, sketching out interfaces, talking to customers and researching.
While Funso was taking these classes, her friend brought up the idea of starting a beauty bar, an establishment which provides beauty amenities ranging from hair and makeup to spa and skincare all under one roof. With the knowledge she had gained from her time at Tech, an entrepreneurial light bulb went off in Funso’s mind.
Funso’s older sister works as a professional makeup artist, so she had come into contact with many of the issues that beauty artists face when seeking potential customers and building clientele, and she immediately realized that she could fix these complications with the aid of technology. She wanted to develop an idea that would eliminate client guess work when searching for the right artists, as well as enhance communication with an emphasis on honesty and talent. And thus, her start-up, NexxChair was brought to life.
NexxChair is a tech-enabled beauty services platform that focuses on increasing the efficiency of finding beauty artists with the necessary skills and matching them to the appropriate clients, specifically taking women of color into consideration. The team is a cross functional group of designers, marketers and artists based in Atlanta, Georgia who have been working together since Fall 2016. The NexxChair team provides package services for a variety of events and occasions including special events/parties, weddings, TV/film, industry work (for runways and photo shoots) and print/publishing.
“The future of Nexxchair is global,” Funso says. “I want NexxChair to be a household name, especially within the fashion industry.” Although based in Atlanta, the start-up has already expanded to create a beauty team in Lagos, Nigeria. Funso is also working to leverage technology and build an app to make the process even more accessible. As a unique company in an industry with little to no modernization, Funso hopes she and her team will one day be a representation of the topmost standards for high quality makeup services in the world.
The advice that Funso would give particularly to women of color at Georgia Tech is “If you have the insight to an idea that is very specific to your cultural group, and it is something that you can bring impact to, Georgia Tech is willing to fund and support you as you innovate and disrupt whatever the system is…Believe in your idea, and believe in yourself and that you can create change.”
