There is more to Connie Mashaba than just hair

In the early 1980s, Connie Mashaba was working as a junior bookkeeper at a hotel chain, while her husband, Herman – a true super-salesman – sold hair care products to township customers from the boot of his car. It was not always easy, not least because the government of the time prohibited black people from acting as sole agents for any product.

Then in 1985, as hair salons mushroomed in townships, Herman realised the potential of the untapped black cosmetics market and decided to form his own company. He borrowed R30 000 and convinced Connie, along with two others, to join him. Black Like Me, later to become a near-ubiquitous name in ethnic hair care, was born.

Initially manufacturing by night and cold-selling by day, the brand became a near-instant success, striking a chord with black women who were increasingly exploring their sense of beauty and self-worth in a slowly changing South Africa.

“I was involved in the company from the beginning and I did everything from reception all the way up. I’m an all-rounder, but my love has always been for administration and finance, so that was where I landed up,” recalls Connie, who took over the reins of the business in 2004.

Herman is now chairperson of Amka, the major cosmetics company that merged with Black Like Me several years ago, and he is no longer active in the business. Connie, on the other hand, holds the position of managing director of Black Like Me, with a special responsibility for marketing, sales and brand building.

Elegant, charming and welcoming, I meet Mashaba at the company’s offices in an unprepossessing industrial suburb on the outskirts of Pretoria.

She is surprisingly frank; saying she believes the business still has a long way to go before it reaches the heights she would like. It seems a surprising admission, given the strong brand recognition among black South Africans and spread of its hair relaxers, shampoos, treatments and perming products.

Mashaba agrees that mind share is “huge”, but says market share is not more than 10% and needs to improve. “Mind share doesn’t put rands in the bank,” she observes pragmatically.

She is frank in other ways, too. While she enjoys getting involved in the nitty-gritty of educating customers at grassroots level, how many MDs of a hair care company will admit they do not know how to do hair? “It’s not my style to be a hairdresser,” she says.

Instead, she leaves that to others and concentrates on visiting, mentoring and encouraging the hairdresser-cum-entrepreneurs who use her products, often in far-flung townships and rural communities.

Ups and downs

Mashaba believes the reasons for the imbalance between mind share and market share are historic. Certainly, the company’s past shows its fair share of ups and downs.

Business was booming until, in 1993, fire destroyed the factory. “We had insurance, but you cannot replace the productivity and other things,” she recalls. “It set us back many years and we lost lots of market share. That’s why, when Colgate came in, we thought it would help us to regain that share.”

The deal with global conglomerate Colgate-Palmolive in 1997 was seen as a strategic partnership that would allow Black Like Me to benefit from Colgate’s established distribution channels, both locally and further afield.

But the Mashabas’ entrepreneurial spirit and the more rigid corporate culture of the multinational proved to be a mismatch. “That set us two steps back again – because all the clients, especially the independents, were being treated badly and many of our traditional customers backed off,” she recollects.

Within two years, the deal was reversed and the two businesses again went their separate ways.

Mashaba believes things are only now getting back on track after those double disasters: “Every business has a life cycle. I think we went through the peak and the trough – and it looks like we are getting out of the trough.”

More recently, in 2004, Black Like Me merged again, this time with Amka – a large and long-standing rival in the hair care market.

Amka bought a 49.9% stake, with Black Like Me gaining access to a highly developed manufacturing, product development as well as
distribution operation.

It now operates as a division of Amka, which has a number of products – including Easy Waves and Sofn’free – that compete with Black Like Me.

At around the same time, Herman left to pursue other business interests and Connie, who had by then spent many years in a variety of roles within the company, took over as managing director.

With Amka looking after manufacturing and distribution, her portfolio became strongly sales and marketing-orientated.

The company remains private and says it does not disclose figures in order to protect itself from competitors.

Interestingly, and despite the dramatic change in the country’s political climate since the company was founded, Mashaba says there is no thought of changing the Black Like Me name.

“We have had people say we should change the name because it’s no longer relevant. But it’s not just a name; it’s what it stands for. In the dark days of apartheid, we came up with this product and we just wanted to make people aware that ‘it’s okay to be black’. We wanted to be evocative.

“So we believe that whoever wants to use our products is confident and proud of their heritage.

“We believe in our product and our name. It’s just the name we gave the brand at the time, and we stand by it,” she adds.

Knowing the market

Black Like Me’s main customer base is hair salons, rather than private individuals who buy from retail stores. So Mashaba and her colleagues spend much time on the ground, dealing with them at grassroots level.

“Hairdressers are pivotal in making sure that our products are used properly. We do lots of workshops where we train them to use our merchandise, manage their salons, budget properly and ensure salon hygiene. We make sure they are professional in whatever they do,” she explains.

Mashaba says she finds this involvement “fun” and regularly travels to areas such as Venda to assist with educating salon owners and staff.

“I’m talking about disadvantaged people who have no clue about hairdressing. They got into it because they can’t find jobs or have no Matric.

“We try to encourage them to be passionate about what they’re doing,” she says.

Her team comprises brand managers, technical back-up and in-store promoters. The latter are also useful in an informal market research capacity – funnelling customer comments back to head office for later analysis. “The promoters in the stores get good information… the people who run the shops are very honest with us,” she explains.

Mashaba is less enamoured with formal market research such as focus groups (a small group selected from a wider customer base and asked, via open discussion, for its opinions) as a means of getting feedback. Indeed, she believes much of such information is flawed, as interviewees tell the researchers what they think they want to hear.

Retail outlets

While Black Like Me does supply to a range of retail outlets, it is preferable for the women in the street (only 10% of users are men) to have the products applied by a professional instead of doing it at home. “When they do it at home, they often use the product incorrectly and then blame the manufacturer,” she declares.

The company does not supply product direct to salons, who instead purchase their stock from retail outlets. Customers who do purchase products for home use are typically in the lower to middle-income brackets (what marketers call LSM 4-7 in the system of lifestyle measurement).

Mashaba says her clientele is essentially conservative, which means that new products are introduced sparingly, following definite long-term trends rather than fads and seasonal changes.

Packaging changes, too, have to be carefully managed to avoid alienating customers.

“It’s not like the beauty markets, which change constantly. But we do try to follow the trends and keep an eye on what the people want,” she says.

“Most trends come from the [United States] and the new product is ‘hair mayonnaise’. It’s like a treatment and conditioner that’s soft and makes your hair shine. It also helps with your scalp.

“When we started Black Like Me about 25 years go, the perm was in fashion. Then in the mid-1980s, the fashion became relaxers. Then dreadlocks came. Now people are favouring dry hair, which requires extensions,” she observes.

However, there is still a definite need for product usage, she adds.

Pricing, like the client base, is conservative and reflects the brand’s working-class roots.

Mashaba calls pricing “competitive” and says it is aimed at attracting both urban and rural customers. “When we established the company, we said we wanted it to be like Coca-Cola – everyone can afford Coke,” she smiles.

International markets

And, like Coke, the company is aiming to make its presence felt on the international stage, too. One of the reasons for the Amka partnership was to capitalise on the latter’s African distribution channels, which has seen Black Like Me enter Angola, Cameroon, Swaziland, Botswana, Mozambique and Namibia.

Mashaba says she would like to get into more countries – if she can find the right partners. “If you don’t have partners, it’s a problem because of the different regulations in different countries.

“For example, we’re trying to get into Nigeria, which is a huge market of over 150 million people. But it’s very difficult and they have stringent rules. You have to first register your product and there’s a lot of money to be paid before you can actually start selling.

“If you don’t have a partner – and don’t have local recourse – you lose money,” she adds.

Another market is Papua New Guinea, a large island in the South Pacific close to Australia. “The relationship has been good and is growing. The Melanesian people use a lot of our relaxers,” says Mashaba.

Black Like Me has maintained a small presence in the United Kingdom since 2002, but there are no plans to enter the US market.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done in Africa and South Africa, and we want to focus our resources on that,” she explains.

At home

With husband Herman being the founder of the company – and still a non-executive director via his involvement with Amka – is there potential for too much ‘talking shop’ within the Mashaba household?

Laughing, Connie says she refuses to discuss Black Like Me business out of hours. “At home, it must be home time – you need balance,” she says. “If we discussed things, we’d only end up fighting because he’d tell me things like ‘your management style is not tight’.”

The couple have two teenage children, with whom they “do a lot of activities together”.

There is golf, tennis and quality time, usually at weekends due to the couple’s hectic weekday schedule.

A last word from Mashaba: “I want to work as hard as I can and have fun.” Presumably, much of that fun will be in educating and mentoring rural hairdressers – providing she does not have to touch anyone’s hair! ▲

Mike Simpson