Anyone who has sat through a full head of knotless braids knows the maths. Appointments can take anywhere from three to 12 hours depending on the size of the braids, your hair texture and the length you choose.
And that is the client’s side of the chair – the braider is standing the whole time, separating hair, tensioning, repeating the same tiny movements thousands of times until their hands cramp.
Aisata Diallo, 24, knows that side of the chair well. She stopped braiding professionally because of what it was doing to her body. Now she is building a company to fix the problem, it is called Tressfecta, “Braiding prep takes hours. It doesn’t have to.”
Why we care: Beauty tech has spent over a decade perfecting the hair straightener. The textured-hair market, worth billions and built on hours of manual labour, has been left to work it out by hand.
Braider First, Founder Second
Diallo’s path into hardware started with a side hustle. At Northeastern University in Boston, she found there were very few braiders or textured-hair specialists she could get to, so she started a small business doing it herself.
“I’ve always braided my hair growing up and, at some point in my college career, started braiding other people’s hair,” she told TechCrunch. “Throughout that experience, I was very close to some of the pain points in the styling process and complained about it constantly.”
Professional braiders routinely deal with cramping and carpal tunnel syndrome after long days on their feet.
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“I stopped braiding, and one of the reasons that I stopped braiding was due to the physical toll it has on your body,” she said. What she did not know, at first, was what to do about it – until she started wondering whether the new wave of AI and automation could take on part of the process.
Meet The Plait Pilot
Tressfecta’s first product is not a braiding robot. It is something arguably, more useful: a device called the Plait Pilot that handles the prep. “The prep work is invisible labor. Not anymore. Hours of manual hair separation before a single braid is started. We know. We’ve done it,” explains the Tressfecta website.
Before a single braid goes in, braiding hair has to be pulled from its packs and separated into pieces of exactly the right size. For small braids, that alone can take hours. The Plait Pilot is designed to do it for you. According to Diallo, a stylist places the braiding hair on top of the device, sets the size they want it separated into, and the machine divides the pieces and dispenses them back one at a time, so the braider can simply reach for the next one while they work.
It is the kind of unglamorous innovation that tends to get overlooked, which is partly why nobody has done it. “It’s very challenging to build this kind of tool in this space,” Diallo said, pointing to how much nuance there is in the braiding process from one style to the next. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.”
Diallo had the idea for the company last year; she is now working on the Plait Pilot prototype and connecting with stylists and braiders to test it.
Compare that to the money sloshing around the rest of hair tech. Dyson, ghd and Shark have spent years and vast research budgets competing over who can dry, curl and straighten hair fastest with the least damage, and the results fill the gadget guides every Christmas. Almost none of that engineering has been pointed at the braiding chair, where the problem is not heat damage but time and repetitive strain. It is a gap that is obvious to anyone who has ever booked a braider.
Tressfecta is, technically pre-launch. Diallo has bootstrapped the company so far, topping it up with grant and accelerator funding, and is preparing to go out for her first proper round.
Investors have historically been nervous about physical products with long development cycles, and beauty devices aimed at Black women have been a harder sell still, despite the size of the market. Halobraid, is another start-up working on braiding automation, and raised $7 million earlier this year, and likewise Google engineer Chisom Okwor is the founder of Braidiant – which suggests the culture is shifting.
Braiders are skilled workers doing physically punishing work for hours at a stretch, and the tools they use have barely changed in decades. If a device can shave an hour or two off a style and spare a stylist’s wrists in the process, that sounds like tech we can get certainly get behind.
For more on the companies rethinking beauty from the inside, read our guide to 50 beauty tech start-ups to have on your radar.
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