Why 3 Harvard MBAs Sell Shower Caps

LEVERAGING ESTABLISHED DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS 

Still, the MBAs are attempting to sell and scale a product that you can get for free in a hotel bathroom. To overcome that detail, Palmer says the team has been doing direct sales from their website and tapping into already established hair salon distribution channels.

“Women who go to get their hair done and spend a lot of money on it to get it dyed, or permed or straightened, they rely a lot of the advice of the hairstylist,” Zagorovskaya believes, also noting they have already had their cap placed in two Cambridge-based salons. Through their website, they sold 200 products in the first two weeks and now “keep selling out of inventory,” Zagorovskaya says.

The three are taking the fledgling business day-by-day and are unsure if they will continue with it full-time upon graduation this spring. But, Zagorovskaya says, they’d love to be able to build it into a full-fledged beauty products company. And Palmer is with her.

“I mean, they always say once you start seeing a lot of HBS people going into one area, that’s the next bubble that’s going to burst,” Palmer jokes. “What we’re really excited about is that we’re actually doing physical products. Our long-term plan for the company is to remain a consumer products company. A lot of other startups are obviously a lot more tech-focused with apps or enabling a traditional service through an app. But this is the type of actual physical product that will not go away.”

FLEXING THE HARVARD ENTREPRENEURSHIP MUSCLES

For now, the team will continue to flex the muscle of Harvard resources. The trio was recently accepted into Harvard Innovation Lab’s Venture Incubation Program. “We’re meeting with executives in the beauty industry, branding, fashion, product design, people who have been super helpful to us as we tackle a lot of these challenges,” Zagorovskaya says of the program.

“We have a lot more resources at our disposal, both from school and our professors,” she continues. “Entrepreneurship is a trend that I think business schools are embracing and their students are not going into consulting and banking as much.”

Whether the team is on the verge of making good on a potentially massive market and game-changing product or it’s a quick flash in the pan, the three women are committed. And they hope to join a rapidly growing list of highly successful Boston-based and women-led ventures.

“We want to continue to develop products that will save women time but not compromise the way they look, because that’s important, especially for professional women,” Palmer explains. “This isn’t just for people who care about beauty or fashion, this is for people like Sheryl Sandberg who gets her hair blown out three times a week because she’s on TV doing interviews and doing all of these things and she doesn’t have time because she also has kids.”

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