What the business is
Richualist makes Mint, a heated styling appliance for textured hair that detangles, conditions, gels and styles in one stroke using refillable pods.
The bet
Textured hair needs bespoke hardware: a single-stroke tool with refillable product pods can collapse an 80-minute wash day and open a beauty-hardware white space.
Starting capital
Sold her home and liquidated her 401(k); about $1.4M raised to commercialize; one of the first 100 Black women to raise more than $1M in venture funding.
How it started
Around 2018, after a Shark Tank episode, Myers sketched the idea on a legal pad and built a Frankenstein prototype from Ace Hardware and CVS parts; materials-science company Dow, which had just spotted the same white space, supplied engineering and manufacturing help.
What happened
About five years of development followed — her team had to run its own research because basics like average product use for textured hair didn't exist. In 2022, just as she was set to expand, she was diagnosed with stage-three colorectal cancer and closed her round during treatment, taking meetings from the chemo chair at Johns Hopkins. She applied to Shark Tank in 2023, appeared that year (aired 2024), and landed a deal from Mark Cuban and Emma Grede.
What has to be true
The beauty-hardware market had no tools for textured hair: everything from hot combs to flat irons was designed to change curly hair's chemistry rather than work with it.
Buyers in beauty R&D had no lived experience of wash day, so the problem was structurally invisible to the people funding products.
Hardware economics forced an extreme personal bet — house and 401(k) — because a niche hardware idea could not attract conventional venture money early.
Distribution followed proof: the Shark Tank deal with Cuban and Grede led to Ulta's online store earlier in 2026, and the company is now close to selling out.
What can be applied
The gap was invisible to the industry because the industry had never lived it: build for the users the R&D suite doesn't have, and even a materials giant will follow.
Aftermath
As of October 11, 2026, Mint sells on Ulta's online store, the company is preparing to market itself as sold out while mapping expansion, and Richualist was named one of TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield 200 for Disrupt 2026 — where Myers says she is most excited 'for textured hair to be sitting on the stage with some of the most sophisticated tech in the space.'
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