“I’m the founder of Topicals and the launch of my new brand ‘Bread’ flopped,” read one of Olamide Olowe’s latest TikTok videos with over 100,000 likes. In April of last year, the founder announced her new holding company Cost Of Doing Business (CODB) with haircare brand Bread Beauty Supply as their very first beauty acquisition. Now, just over one year later, “imagine me launching and it flopping. Absolutely flopping,” she said in the post.
With Topicals, Olowe sold over six million units of their viral Faded Under Eye Masks and raised over 22 million dollars in funding. But, the formula that turned the skincare brand into a viral movement didn’t work for Bread. “Typically when a Black-owned business gets acquired, so many things are changed and altered in a way that isn’t serving our community,” Olowe told ESSENCE exclusively last year.
Except, when she launched Bread’s first product under CODB, the slick-hold gel, the response was next to none. “[We had] almost no sales,” she said about the gel, which was formulated to slick 4C hair into updos for up to 12 hours. “I did what I thought worked at Topicals for Bread,” she says. As a self-funded acquisition, “I have spent basically my life’s savings trying to revive this brand.”
Olowe decided to go straight to the source, her community, to find out what was going wrong with Bread. “What did we do wrong in our rollout and our marketing that didn’t land really well with our audience? Was it the brand positioning? Was it not clear what the product did? Did we not see enough before and afters?”
Back at square one, her community answered. In the comments, some say they were confused why the brand was called “Bread” and since it is, why the products don’t follow the same theme. For example, a hair gel being called “jam” or a gloss coined the “glaze.” Meanwhile, others say they didn’t even know Bread was for Black women. “The models were usually mixed so I quit looking at the brand,” one comment read. To another comment, Olowe made a response video.
While some suggested Bread be an extension of Topicals, one commenter Blessing Nwodo said the two brands’ customers are “totally different.” “I actually did not want Bread and Topicals to be the same person [and] wanted to build different worlds for each brand,” Olowe responded. But, “I almost feel like that’s where I made a mistake.”
Looking back at her first-ever Bread campaign, the A Love Like Ours film, she says she received backlash from the Bread community saying they didn’t like how much the brand emulated Topicals. “I thought I didn’t do the right thing by trying to bring more of my own vision for the brand to the marketing and storytelling,” she said.
Trying to find the sweet spot between preserving the founding vision while positioning the brand for growth and commercial success, it’s a question Olowe said she’s been struggling with over the past year. “I think that’s also impacted the growth of the company,” she said.
For one, Bread’s hair-oil everyday gloss is a fan-favorite. Except, she says it has no real function other than fragrance (and acting as lip gloss for your hair). “That is a very different business than what I’m used to which is function that we can then wrap in culture,” she said, referring to Topicals.
Deciding whether to lean into her or Bread’s original vision, it’s worth mentioning Bread was sold to Olowe for a reason. “They understand what it takes to build a generational defining brand in this market and I can’t wait to see where they want to take the brand,” Bread’s founder Maeva Heim told ESSENCE right after the acquisition. And, that means not being afraid to Olowe-ify the brand like she did Topicals (but in a Bread haircare way).
Taking in her community’s feedback, Olowe is re-learning how to launch another successful business. Starting from scratch, “I felt so much pressure to be successful because Topicals was successful,” she said. “This video is just to push myself to remember it’s actually okay to fail.” And, when she succeeds, this moment will just be part of the story.
