BOSSY!: So then you always wanted to do hair?
Miko: I think I secretly wanted to do hair. I don’t think my mother or father respected the profession. I started doing hair at a very young age. I enjoyed it, I was good at it. I always wanted a pink salon but I was just too embarrassed to tell my mom and dad when I was kid. I thought that they wouldn’t like it so much.
BOSSY! Okay, so you and Titi have built your salon business, but how did you decide to go from styling hair to creating your own styling products? What was that process like?
Miko: That’s a great question. It was actually bath time with my son, when I realized I could no longer maintain my hair in a straight styled state. My hair is naturally kinky in some areas and naturally curly in others. Well, he used to splash all around in there and once the water hit my hair it would just revert and shrink back. Now at the time we were doing hair in my house, because we had lost the salon. So if clients wanted to get to get their hair done, they needed to come to my house. I was a single parent. I didn’t want to leave my baby. So I’d be giving baths on the fourth floor and come down to the second floor to do their hair. They were seeing my hair now in its shrunk up state and they liked it. It didn’t take us long to realize we needed to become experts when it came to hair texture as in curls, kinks and waves.
Before there were products in Walgreens, Walmart and Target, my sister and I took to our kitchen table. Because there were no products like Miss Jessie’s out on the market to support all that we wanted to do. So what we did, was took to the kitchen table and created it from scratch the way we saw our grandmother Jessie Mae Branch do when something wasn’t available in the local stores. She would make it herself and so do we.