From Idea to $20K Customers in less than 1 year: Brand Building Lessons for Educators and Course Creators from an Ecommerce Hair Extension Brand
Have you ever wished you could look behind the curtain of how a hair or beauty brand is built in real time? That's exactly what we're doing in this conversation with Tyler, founder of Styx Hair.
Tyler and I first met in 2024 when he came to my Escape to Elevate retreat in Spain. He was looking for clarity around his brand to launch a new offer. He had a powerful vision but no clear vehicle yet.
Several months later, Tyler launched Styx Hair, a stylist-owned hair extension company that secured thousands of customer accounts in its first year. Some of his top customers have spent over $20,000 with him.
While Tyler built an e-commerce brand, the strategies he used apply directly to educators and course creators. This is a masterclass in brand foundations, direct response marketing, simple Facebook and Instagram ads that convert, and why conversion metrics beat vanity metrics every single time.
What You'll Learn (Educators, mentors + coaches, this definitely applies to you):
How to identify gaps in your market even when it feels saturated
Why conversion content matters more than viral content for selling courses
The exact ad strategy that brought in 30-60 customer accounts per day (works for course launches too)
How to use mini offers to warm up your audience before selling your signature program
Brand positioning strategies that drive sales, not just followers
Should You Choose Your Business Model or Your Mission First?
Jodie: When you and I first met, you were very clear on the impact you wanted to have in the industry. But you weren't super clear on the vehicle for that. Can you talk about how that evolved?
Tyler: I've always thought about impact first, then income will follow. I wanted to help other stylists make more money. Initially, I was thinking business coaching. I was able to grow my business to multi six figures in a small town in Arkansas and then in New York City. I wanted other stylists to have that knowledge.
Then I realized it's not my passion to teach that methodology. My passion is the products used to make more money. The install method, the hair itself. Now I sell hair online as a wholesale provider so stylists can rebrand it as their own or sell it to their clients at a premium because it's premium quality. They make a higher profit margin and can make more money behind the chair.
Jodie: That phrase "be stubborn about your goals and flexible about your methods" is definitely a living example here. Creating a hair brand wasn't random. Wholesaling hair is what allowed you to create massive profit margins behind the chair, ensure consistent quality for your clients, and build a brand in your own right.
How Do You Find Market Gaps in a Saturated Industry?
Jodie: How did you identify that this was a gap in the market? It's an investment to start an e-commerce brand.
Tyler: A little bit of both gut feeling and market research. I know a lot of hairstylists who do extensions through taking classes, going to retreats, Instagram. I've met several hundred stylists over the years. A lot of them had started using wholesale providers because they were sick of traditional brands.
I was seeking out the same solution. I needed lower cost, higher quality, and more consistency. If I needed this and I knew other stylists were using this, I wanted to bring that to the United States instead of having it all outsourced overseas.
Not every stylist has the capacity to stay up until 2 AM to talk to a supplier on the other side of the world. Not every stylist has the ability to invest multiple six figures to get the price point they need. I wanted to do that for them so they could have easier communication, easier access to inventory, easier shipping.
What Type of Content Actually Converts to Sales?
Jodie: There are a lot of extension brands on the market. What did you do to set yourself apart?
Tyler: I really think it came from just being real. Real in my marketing, real in the DMs I was messaging back and forth with people. I give the most honest answers that I personally would use working behind the chair. I still work behind the chair.
I focused on real issues that stylists face. The false advertising that other brands are putting out there, the lies in their marketing, the fact that they're marketing to our clients and not just to stylists, selling directly to our clients. I was so blunt with what I was saying that I grabbed the attention of stylists who were interested in using our product.
Jodie: You were creating your brand around the problem you solve. Was figuring out the problem something natural because you were so intimately familiar with your customer?
Tyler: As a stylist myself, as a hair extension specialist, I was thinking: what would I want to see from a brand? How would I want a brand to have my back? How would I want a brand represented to my clients? I was the consumer myself. I'm solving a problem that I solved for myself.
What Are the Biggest Branding Mistakes Educators Make?
Jodie: What's the biggest branding lesson you've learned in the first year of Styx?
Tyler: Two things.
First, ignore the influencers in the industry. Stop comparing yourself. Their focus is engagement. Your focus is sales. If I want to make more conversions, I need to put out content that makes conversions, not content that goes viral.
I don't care about going viral. I don't care how many followers I have. I care about how many sales I'm making per month, how many stylists are signing up every day, every week. Those are the metrics I use to measure success.
We have almost 25,000 followers. I posted something the other day and it got like 20 or 30 likes. I don't care because I know that thing I posted gets me conversions. Conversion is what matters.
I could be paying attention to what other hair brands are saying online and trying to mimic them. That's not what has gained me success. No other brand I saw was selling what I'm selling for the price I'm selling it at. So why would I copy their marketing?
Second, focus on conversion content, not content that gets the most engagement. The content that gets the most conversions is not always the content that gets the most engagement.
Does Engagement on Social Media Actually Matter?
One of our top customers this year has spent over $20,000 with us. This customer does not follow me on Instagram. Has never DMed me, never sent me an email, never liked one of my Instagram posts. But she's still one of my biggest customers.
For her, it's simply a business transaction. She doesn't need to talk to us. She knows what she's ordering. If I were to focus on the social media aspect, I would lose touch with the actual success metrics.
How to Get Your First Customers (The Real Strategy)
Jodie: Can you walk us through your customer acquisition from starting Styx from scratch to now, a year later with thousands of customer accounts?
Tyler: It started off with me posting several times a day just to build up content so once somebody landed on the page, they'd have something to look at that would answer questions.
Then I started running very simple ads. I learned about running ads on Meta versus on the Instagram app. You get a better price point and better audience specifications. You can narrow down your target audience to their job title, their interests, what they're looking at on social media.
I started putting more money into ads and getting a better return on investment. My capacity doesn't typically include posting on social media daily. I work in the salon and reinvest that money into Styx. I work more in the salon and put my money into running ads.
Ads grew the audience fast. We were getting a couple hundred followers a day at some points. Now depending on when we're running ads, we'll grow. When we turn ads off because we get too many customer accounts and our inventory shrinks, we have to rebuild inventory to match the customer accounts we have.
Jodie: What I love about this is that ads amplify what's working, but you can't buy brand resonance. Can you talk about the impact of having your brand foundations clear?
Tyler: They're almost one and the same. If you want your customers to know what you offer and resonate with what you're selling, you need to solve a problem for them.
For me, I'm solving the issue of bigger brands that have lower quality but higher price points. I'm flipping that. We have a lower price point and better quality. I solved two problems in one.
I will literally say in an ad: "Sell higher quality hair at a lower price. Check us out." It might seem basic, but it's what has worked for Styx. I'm telling you exactly what the problem is and that I solved it. It's simple, but it worked.
Should You Start with Low-Priced Offers or High-Ticket?
Jodie: Let's talk about how you're acquiring the ability to retarget customers and bring them into your ecosystem.
Tyler: When Styx started and I started running ads, I was getting so many orders, but 90% were for one pack of hair. One pack is like half a row, so you're not getting much. I felt discouraged because I was spending money on advertising and getting a bunch of small orders.
But what was happening is the audience was getting warmed up. Like an educator selling a mini offer. All those small orders, 3, 4, 5, 6 months later, they've come back and now they're doing orders every week. The average order went from $175 to over $500 or $600. It tripled or quadrupled.
It took patience, warming up the audience, warming up the stylists I was reaching through advertising to get them to buy my bigger offers. Some of my first customers doing one pack orders a year ago are now doing large bulk orders with me. We're doing private labeling for them. You just have to keep warming up your audience.
What Results Can You Expect from Paid Ads?
If we're spending $175 to $250 per day on ads, we'll get between 30 and 60 customer accounts in a day. But we're paying for it. We're investing that money and getting that return back.
Out of those 30 to 60 customer accounts, we'd probably get maybe a third who actually purchase within the first 48 hours of creating their account. We might get 200 followers, 30 customer accounts, and 10 people who make a purchase. It's a funnel.
How Do You Deal with Rejection and Slow Sales?
I think as educators and business owners, it can sting when somebody says they're not ready to purchase, especially after you spend time informing them about how this could benefit their business, giving them freebies, talking to them in DMs.
But a lot of those customers do turn into actual customers in the future. If it's not for you, it's not for you. That's fine. My goal is to make an impact on the industry and the hair supply chain in the United States and Canada. If you're not part of that, it's okay.
How Long Does It Actually Take to Build a Successful Brand?
It took several weeks before I made my first sale. I remember thinking, am I just not getting the sale? Do I have to turn on some notification? Then I finally made my first sale and I was like, oh no, I actually just haven't made any sales yet.
It took weeks of posting several times a day. Then it took months for it to be consistent. Even now, we'll have low days, high days, great weeks, low weeks. You just gotta keep kicking.
Final Thoughts
If you're building something new, whether it's an education business or an e-commerce brand, there's a lot of upfront work. It's not instant gratification. You don't pick the flower on the same day you plant the seed.
Focus on impact. Income will come after. Have patience and listen to the experts.
Connect with Tyler:
Styx Hair Instagram: @styxhair
Website: styxhair.com
Want more content like this? Send me a DM on Instagram @itsjodiebrown and let me know what your biggest takeaway was from Tyler's story.
And if you’d like to listen in on the exact podcast episode that accompanies this blog post, you can do that here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Xo Jodie
Ps. Don't forget to subscribe to the Sought After Educator Podcast to get more insights like this delivered to your phone every week.
