Sienna Naturals Co-Owners Issa Rae and Hannah Diop on Bringing the Brand to Sephora
Long before Issa Rae officially came on board as co-owner of hair-care company Sienna Naturals in 2020, she was a "guinea pig" for the products, she jokes. "I had just done a big chop and was learning how to take care of my hair. That was the intention, among other things: Starting from scratch and trying to make it healthy," she recalls.
Founded by Rae's sister-in-law Hannah Diop in 2012, the brand centers on products made for textured hair and with "clean" ingredients.
"Whether we were seeing each other at Thanksgiving or a barbeque, I realized I was being courted and didn't even know it," Rae chuckles. Eight years after Sienna Naturals launched, she joined as a co-owner and began to serve as a face of the brand in campaigns. Joining the team felt "easy," she recalls: "I was already using the products. I was in this space with 'Insecure' where I was so intentional about showcasing natural hair. [With Sienna Naturals], I had a product I was using, believed in and was ready to take to the next level."
On Tuesday, the company celebrates a major beauty-industry milestone: launching at Sephora.
"Sephora is so appealing because they are the biggest beauty retailer" that's also "building out the prestige hair category, where we sit," Diop tells Fashionista. In addition to being sold direct-to-consumer, the brand's retail footprint also includes Nordstrom, JCPenney, HSN and Credo Beauty.
Sienna Naturals launches on Sephora.com with 11 SKUs, including shampoo, conditioner and styling products. This follows the brand's participation in Sephora's 2024 accelerator program, a competitive incubator for early-stage beauty brands.
"[Sephora is] so great in terms of building brands and accessing their audiences and knowing data points we want to reach. There's so much synergy, and to be in Sephora is a dream," says Diop.
Photo: Courtesy of Sienna Naturals
A Howard University and Wharton graduate, Diop was inspired to start the brand in her Harlem apartment in 2012 after growing up struggling to care for her curly hair: "Picture the early '90s in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I'm on the YMCA swim team in the dead of winter. From a very young age, I was thrown into this locker room with peers who didn't have hair like mine," she recalls. Diop says her mom, who didn't know how to care for textured hair, would buy products from a natural food store that she "thought were the best for our health, but they didn't have enough slip, didn't detangle my hair and didn't nourish it."
"What we have found is that by centering textured hair consumers and designing the products the way that we do, we've actually made a superior product for all customers. When you're designing for the complexities of textured hair — such as dryness, breakage, damage, hair loss, et cetera — you're solving for all consumers on so many fronts," Diop adds.
The Sephora launch has been a long time coming: Diop recently found a screenshot of some texts with Rae from 2018 when they were brainstorming, in which she wrote that they were "going to take this all the way to Sephora."
The co-owners hope that through expanding the retail footprint of Sienna Naturals, and the growth that comes along with it, they will continue to build on their mission of catering to textured hair with a particular focus on ingredients and product safety.
"I think there needs to be more of an approachable conversation to tending to our hair," says Rae. "We already have such a neglectful health industry when it comes to Black women in particular. When the products we're using are exacerbating that, that's terrible," Rae says. "Who's going to think about us except for us?"
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