Mint by Richualist detangles and styles textured hair in one pass

Mint handles four steps in a single pass: it detangles, conditions, applies gel and styles. It’s shaped a bit like a flat iron, but instead of heat plates it holds a refillable pod of hair product inside. You clamp it on a section of hair and comb it through, and the tool spreads the product evenly from root to tip.

The clever part is the warming system. Mint gently heats the conditioner or gel before it touches your hair, which helps it spread and soak in. Because the tool combs and applies product at the same time, you don’t have to tug at each section over and over, which is where a lot of breakage comes from. Myers says that cuts shedding and breakage by up to 70%.

The pods work a bit like coffee capsules. When Myers pitched on Shark Tank, they cost $6 each, or $36 for a monthly subscription of six. There’s also a travel-size version of the tool.

Myers got the idea about eight years ago while watching a Shark Tank pitch for a curly-hair product. She noticed that almost every hair tool on the market was designed to change the structure of naturally curly hair rather than work with it. She sketched a business plan on a legal pad and built a rough prototype from parts she bought at Ace Hardware and CVS.

Getting it built was the hard part. Myers says hardware is very tough to fund, and a gadget for a group investors saw as niche was tougher still. In meetings with beauty-industry executives, she found that many had never heard of wash day and didn’t know how long the process takes. Her team even had to run its own research on basics, such as how much product a typical person with textured hair uses, because the data didn’t exist.

Help came from an unexpected place. Dow, the materials science giant, spotted an early prototype during a startup accelerator program. It was setting up a textured hair care unit of its own, so it worked with Richualist and gave the startup engineering help and manufacturing advice.

To pay for early development, Myers sold her home and cashed out her 401(k) retirement savings. She calls it a crazy bet that paid off. The company brought in about $1.4 million to commercialize and validate the product, putting Myers among the small number of Black women founders who have raised more than $1 million in venture money. Development took about five years.

The path got harder in 2022, when Myers was diagnosed with stage three colorectal cancer just as the company was getting ready to launch. She closed the funding round while still in treatment, working on deals from her laptop during chemotherapy.

She pitched on Shark Tank in 2023, and the episode aired in 2024. She asked for $150,000 for 10% of the company. Some of the investors worried about the price, which was $400 at the time, while her first 100 units cost $120 each to make. Mark Cuban and Emma Grede, co-founder of the clothing brand Good American, made a joint offer of $150,000 for 15% plus 5% in advisory shares. Grede later helped get Mint onto Ulta’s website earlier this year.

The appeal is simple: less time, less pulling and fewer separate tools. If wash day currently takes you over an hour, a tool that does detangling, conditioning and styling at once could give you much of that time back, and less tugging may mean less breakage.

A few things to weigh before you buy:

• Price: Mint launched at $400 and was later listed at $298 on Richualist’s site. Check the current price on Ulta’s site or Richualist’s own store.
• Ongoing costs: factor in pods if you use the official ones. The tool can also be filled with your own choice of product.
• Availability: the company has dealt with shipping delays and back orders before, and Myers says it is close to selling out again.

Richualist was picked for TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield 200 this year, which earned it a spot at the Disrupt startup conference in October. Myers says the company is now planning how to expand beyond its current online sales.