Walk down the hair tie aisle of any US drugstore and you'll see huge packs. When KOOSHOO looked at the ten best-selling hair tie packs in the US, the average pack held 55 hair ties.
Jesse Schiller and Rachel Evans co-founded KOOSHOO, the plastic-free hair accessory brand, and they joined me on episode 3 of (re)connect. Full disclosure: we manage KOOSHOO's social media at Green Socials, and they're one of the brands I most love working with. This part of our conversation changed how I look at a very small, very ordinary object.
A price ceiling built on cut corners
Most of us carry a fixed idea of what a pack of hair ties should cost. Jesse and Rachel call that ceiling artificial. The low shelf price reflects corners cut at every stage, with no accountability to suppliers, to customers on quality and non-toxicity, or to the planet before and after the product's life.
With little else to innovate on, the industry kept making packs bigger. That raises a simple question. If you buy 55 well-made hair ties, when would you ever need to buy more? Five years later, at the very least. A business built on volume needs its hair ties to snap. Some of the biggest brands even joke in their ads about hair ties breaking and going missing.
Is made locally always better?
KOOSHOO used to manufacture in Los Angeles. Staying there would have meant pricing their hair ties far above what most people are willing to pay. For Jesse and Rachel, an accessible price is part of the mission. As they put it, "If you just keep it really high and elite, what type of impact are you making?"
Moving production offshore let them get affordable, longer-lasting hair ties into far more homes. The company grew, and today it supports more US jobs than it did when it manufactured there, through stores, shipping, brokers and sales agents. They didn't take the decision lightly.
Most ethical brands live with this tension. Shoppers often use "made locally" as a shortcut for better working conditions and better materials. KOOSHOO's story shows that the shortcut doesn't always hold.
A nonprofit mill in southern India
KOOSHOO's flat, sewn hair ties are made in southern India, in a facility founded and run by nuns. It holds several certifications, including Fair Trade and GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard).
The nuns started out as teachers in the 1980s and 1990s, educating young women who struggled to find work. Teaching alone wasn't creating the change they hoped for, so they opened a knitting mill and then a cut-and-sew operation to employ people directly. Today the team is a mix of men and women.
The organisation is itself a nonprofit. After wages and overheads, what's left goes back into the community, funding aged care, cancer treatment for people without access, orphanages and remote health clinics. KOOSHOO has worked with them for seven or eight years.
A rope maker in Japan
The India team didn't have the technology for round hair ties, the shape most people expect. According to Jesse and Rachel, most hair tie brands sold in the West come from a small group of factories that make each other's products under different packaging. They didn't want to be part of that.
After a couple of years of searching, they found a family business in a historical rope-making region of Japan. About fifty or sixty years ago, it realised its rope technology could work for hair accessories too, and it still makes specialty rope today.
Two hair ties per pack
This is my favourite story from the episode. On a visit to their Japanese partner, Jesse and Rachel presented the North American market, including the slide with that average of 55 hair ties per pack. The operations manager raised his hand and asked why people needed so many. In Japan, he said, the average pack holds two.
The team then sent those ten US best-sellers to an independent lab, to test them against the hair ties they would make together. On average, KOOSHOO's hair ties came out two to three times stronger than the nearest competitor.
Hair ties are machine washable. You can care for them like a favourite t-shirt. And as Jesse and Rachel point out, if you own two, you'll look after them far better than if you own 55.
What this means for the rest of us
We've been taught to read a bigger pack as better value. In practice it often means a home full of things we don't value, that take up our space and our time until we sort them back out. KOOSHOO's answer is fewer hair ties, made well, by people who are treated well.
Listen to the full conversation
We also talk about how KOOSHOO started and what life on Norfolk Island, where Rachel grew up and where KOOSHOO is based today, teaches them about community. Listen to episode 3 of (re)connect wherever you get your podcasts.
Find KOOSHOO at kooshoo.com.
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