Design Essentials Celebrates The Future Of Black Hair On Their 35th Anniversary – Essence

Afros have long been a symbol of resistance, from Angela Davis and the Black Panther to Diana Ross and The Supremes.

“The natural hair movement was a rebellion against wearing your hair straight,” president of Design Essentials Cornell McBride Jr. tells ESSENCE exclusively. “But, the issue at that time was there wasn’t anything that allowed you to detangle coily hair.”

Then, the Design Essentials seed was planted. McBride’s father, Cornell McBride Sr., and his business partner founded one of the largest Black hair care companies in the world, M&M Products Company, with their first product, Sta-Sof-Fro, launching in 1973. Unlike other products on the market, their Hair and Scalp Spray was the first to soften textured hair enough to be detangled and picked out, which was an instant hit in the Black community. “That was actually our first entry into this [beauty] space,” he recalls.

After the company was sold, Design Essentials was born in 1990, and, for the past 35 years, has been the standard for Black hair care. “What we wanted to do was build a brand in the salon community, a professional brand, but we built it around what you call economic empowerment,” McBride Jr. says, recruiting people to distribute their products straight from the truck of their car to hairdressers like a moving store. “All they had to do was go into a particular market and promote and sell Design Essentials.”

By then, the natural hair rave slowed down and Design Essentials’s first product was the Wave by Design, a permanent curl system followed by relaxers less than a year later. Although chemical relaxers were on the rise, the brand built their legacy off of doing things differently, from delivery systems to packaging, and even directly educating hairstylists to use their products. “From day one, we’ve always had positive feedback on the brand, the brand performance and have always been known for quality,” he says. “Beyond just selling a product, we’re always active in the market, educating and training the professional.”

Deeper than the salon, however, building a community through every step has been integral to 35 years of success. Which means serving not only the African diaspora, but the African women who birthed our bloodline. “We didn’t want to just extract,” he says, speaking specifically about the Chad-sourced chebe powder in their African Chebe Growth Collection. From building a safer well to fixing the caving roof of a school, the business of Black hair is more than just that, but a community bridging the diaspora back to Africa.

“The market for Black hair is broader than what we believed in 1990,” he says, which is one of the biggest lessons he’s learned in the past 3.5 decades. In reality, ingredients like chebe powder, rosemary and mint, can target coily, curly, and wavy hair, which makes up about two thirds of the hair care market. Evolving with the time, from Sta-Sof-Fro during the natural hair ‘70s to professional perms and relaxers during the Jheri curl ‘90s, staying current means approaching Black hair in every facet it exists in. 

“The one-year-old Design Essentials and the 35-year-old Design Essentials are two different people,” McBride Jr. says, building a legacy that follows the growing needs of the Black community. “You don’t make it to 35 if you’re still doing everything you did when you were one.”