Really good hair is an important investment. People can spend hours in a salon chair getting their hair colored and crimped, stripped and straightened, and then hand over a heroic sum of money for the right to walk out looking fabulous.
And then they realize they need a shower. With water that melts their new hairdo like a hot pan melts ice cream.
If the solution sounds obvious — i.e., put on a shower cap — realize that it’s only a good solution for someone whose hair fits neatly into one and who doesn’t mind looking like a cartoon granny. For people like Syreeta Washington, though, a mere shower cap is no match for her long, formidable locks. People with especially long hair, extensions, or heavy braids or dreadlocks have had to do the kinds of things people like Washington have had to do to protect their hair from the shower water.
“I used to wear two shower caps,” she says. “A friend of mine told me, ‘Do you know that I use a plastic bag from the supermarket when I wash my hair?’”
Would it not be easier to just have one shower cap that fits fuller, longer heads of hair? Well, yes. But Washington could never find one. If she did, it was lined with terrycloth, which, she says, can actually break kinkier hair like she naturally has.
Earlier this year, inspiration struck Washington to take the DIY route and create a shower cap that actually accommodates people of voluminous tress. For seven months, she designed and had prototypes made of what officially became the Satin Dream Shower Cap, a 65-centimeter (that’s about 25 inches), adjustable, satin-lined cap with an added twist—it’s actually kind of sexy.
Washington grew up watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and the image of Granny wearing the poofy cap in the tub stuck with her. She just didn’t feel very sexy wearing one (much less two) of those.
Washington designed the Satin Dream to be sleeker and more playful. In July, the cap became the second product in her e-commerce company’s catalogue of home-spa items, and there will be plenty more to come if this Ewing-based entrepreneur gets her way.
Simply Elegant LLC is Washington’s company. She started it about a year ago and became the CEO, while her business partner (Tracy, of course) became COO. Together, the two operate a home-based company that develops and markets its own line of products designed to give the spa experience at home, without the hefty price tag that comes with luxury treatments.
But, Washington also wants to inspire other people. She figures that if a regular Philly girl like herself can crack the seemingly impenetrable shell that surrounds companies making and selling their own lines of goods, anyone can—as long as they know a few things and actually put the work into it.
Washington’s story starts in Philadelphia, where she was raised by her mom until age 10, when her mother died. After that, she and her sister were raised by their grandmother, as their father was in and out of jail.
Washington admits that she was born with all the markers for failure, from absent father to lack of money.
“I’m a statistic, statistically,” she says. “Someone people would think I wouldn’t have had a chance.”
But even as a kid, she never saw obstacles like those as a reason not to do something she wanted to do. And she knew she needed school.
“Education was the way out,” she says.
She was drawn to education and so wanted to be a teacher that she used to give her little sister assignments.
“I guess it paid off,” Washington laughs. “She’s a breast cancer surgeon today.”
Washington eventually got to be a teacher when she was an undergraduate at Temple University. If that sounds unusual, it is—she was only the second undergrad in the school’s history to be allowed to teach there. She graduated with a bachelor’s in psychology and then stayed for her master’s in counseling psychology. She then went to work counseling at-risk youth.
“I wanted to work with people who needed to meet people from where they are,” she says. “Who needed to see they could make it elsewhere.”
She met and married Tracy, who landed an IT job near Ewing, where the couple have lived since 2000 and have raised two daughters. Deanna is their biological daughter, who also helps with the business. Aaliah Monroe is their adopted daughter, brought into the Washington family because Syreeta decided that “the rules” needed to be broken. Aaliah was a seriously at-risk child in Philadelphia, and Washington was her case manager.
“She didn’t need a case manager,” Washington says. “she needed a parent. So I broke the rules and adopted her.”
Washington continued her counseling career in Trenton, working with Upward Bound and eventually becoming the director of social services of the former Division of Youth and Family Services (now the Department of Children and Families division of Child Protection and Permanency). She’s also worked as a teacher (a paid one, finally), at Rowan College at Burlington County (formerly Burlington County College).
A few years ago, Syreeta and Tracy decided they wanted to actually see each other more often then when one was coming in the door and the other was heading out for work. They also wanted to be able to get their girls through college (Deanna is at Rutgers now), so they started looking into doing their own business on the side.
Tracy had sold some electronics on eBay and soon ended up taking an online seminar about selling your own products via e-commerce.
“When he brought the idea to me, to make my own products,” she says, “I really thought you had to be rich to do something like that.”
As it turned out, some research proved otherwise. She looked into manufacturing and outsourcing, and studied up on how to market and sell through Amazon. She registered Simply Elegant and started out selling the Serenity Now bath pillow—a name she got from the line Frank Costanza screams on the ninth-season episode of the television show “Seinfeld.”
Earlier this year, Washington came up with the Satin Dream cap and went to an online database to get bids for its manufacture. She found a company in China that would make the cap to her specs, which she found out were actually rather complicated. She needed to know size, minimum order, materials and Pantone color. All things she never really had considered before, but suddenly had to know exactly.
On materials, Washington chose to go with PVA plastic as opposed to the cheaper PVC. PVA is much less toxic to the environment and to people, so she opted for it because she didn’t want to get into business to pollute anything.
Simply Elegant is marketing through Amazon, primarily, and Sears for now, as the Washingtons build their revenue.
“We spent so much of our own money to even obtain the inventory that only now in our second year can we spend some time getting the word out about our company,” she says. “For example, today (Aug. 15) is National Relaxation Day and it would have been a great time to promote the bath pillow as a home spa product on a daytime talk show—but I don’t have the inventory to fulfill the volume of orders we would get. It was a missed opportunity for us; one that I hope to capture next year.”
The cap, however, is providing Washington with some cherished, ongoing education. She designed the cap with other women of color in mind. But she’s found out in just a few weeks that Caucasian women with hair to their waists, and even men with long dreads very much want her larger shower cap. The guys have said that the cap, with its feminine drawing, is a little too girly for their tastes. But Washington is taking notes, and is already looking at a next-generation Satin Dream or an additional cap that would appeal to more than just black women.
Washington plans to expand the product line to other items as the business builds and hopes to build the business to the point at which she and Tracy could run it together, full time, because they enjoy being around each other. In the meantime, she’ll keep counseling, being a motivational speaker and being a presenter on human trafficking issues.
She’ll also stay part of the community at large. She is a member of the township’s Drug and Alcohol Alliance and was recently appointed by Gov. Chris Christie to the board of the Ann Klein Forensic Center, which provides care and treatment to individuals suffering from mental illness and who are also within the legal system.
As for her role as a businessperson, Washington plans to keep learning and telling would-be entrepreneurs that with a little grit and determination, good things can happen once they start.
“It’s amazing what you find out when you just take the opportunity,” she says. “It’s only that ‘never’ thinking that stops you.”
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