Carriene Rendbo
Owner and Founder of I love Natural Hair’
ProWoc Celebrates CARRIENE RENDBO, the owner and founder of I Love Natural Hair, an online website for curly hair products. Born in London, Carriene moved to Denmark in 2009 and lives in Copenhagen with her family. ProWoc spoke to Carriene about her journey and achievements.
Tell us about how it all started. What inspired you to start your own company?
The idea of starting and owning my own business was always appealing to me, but I never really knew what that business should be or how to approach it.
I moved to Denmark from the UK, and two years into my transition to Danish life, I started to lose my hair as a result of bad hairstyling practices. This started a chain reaction of events including, being confronted with learning how to take care of my natural hair; something I had never been able to do; to dealing with the emotional issues that I felt afro hair represented in a very Eurocentric society; to then starting my own business to help other women (and men) who I knew had similar stories to tell.
In 2011, I Love Natural Hair was born. It initially started off as a place to purchase healthy hair products for curls, including finding science-based information on how to maintain it.
In 2014, I started workshops to help people take care of their hair, which led to a distribution deal with a US hair product brand. I succeeded in negotiating a distribution deal, which initially was limited to Denmark, but soon turned into becoming a lucrative EU distribution deal.
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