How Aunt Jackie’s Is Shaping the Future of Textured Hair Care
Textured hair care is evolving—and so are the customers shopping in the category. Today’s consumer wants more than a familiar name on the shelf. They’re looking for products with purpose, ingredients they understand, and solutions that make caring for their hair feel easier. For Aunt Jackie’s, staying ahead means staying close to the consumer. From new formulas and ingredients to the changing ways customers discover and shop for hair care products, the brand continues to turn real needs into new ideas. We spoke with Patrice Davis, Manager of Innovation & Project Management at House of Cheatham, about what’s inspiring Aunt Jackie’s next chapter, the trends shaping textured hair care, and how the brand continues to create products that fit the way consumers care for their hair today.
What is your name and role at the company?
My name is Patrice Davis, and I serve as Manager, Innovation & Project Management at House of Cheatham. In my role, I help lead innovation and commercialization across our portfolio of multicultural hair care brands, including Aunt Jackie’s. My work spans everything from identifying consumer and category opportunities to product development, consumer testing, packaging, cross-functional execution and ultimately bringing new products to market. Before moving into innovation, I served as Brand Manager for Aunt Jackie’s, so I’ve had the unique opportunity to experience the brand from both sides — building the consumer-facing strategy and now helping shape what comes next in the innovation pipeline.
What was your very first introduction to the world of textured hair care, and what inspired you to join the team at House of Cheatham?
My introduction to textured hair care started long before I ever thought of it as an industry or a career. Both of my parents hold cosmetology licenses, so hair and beauty have been part of my world for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I watched my mom transform her clients — not only through their hair, but through the confidence they carried when they left her chair. I saw early on that hair care is about so much more than the products or the style; it can have a real impact on how someone sees and feels about themselves. That connection has stayed with me throughout my career, and I’m now working toward earning my own cosmetology license as well. In many ways, building a career within the textured hair care industry felt like a natural next step — an opportunity to combine something that has always been part of my life with my professional experience in brand building, marketing and innovation. That’s what ultimately drew me to House of Cheatham. I saw an opportunity to help shape brands and products created specifically for consumers whose hair experiences I understood personally. Today, I get to take that lifelong connection to textured hair and help translate it into products and innovations that can reach consumers around the world — and that makes the work incredibly meaningful to me.
What is the most touching or memorable story you’ve ever heard from a consumer whose natural hair journey or self-confidence was completely changed by your products?
What stays with me most isn’t necessarily one individual story, but the recurring sentiment we hear from consumers who finally find a product that makes caring for their natural hair feel easier instead of overwhelming. During consumer research, social listening and conversations around our products, you hear women talk about finally finding something that gives them the slip they need, helps them manage their curls or makes wash day less intimidating. Those comments may sound simple, but they represent something much bigger. Hair is deeply connected to identity and confidence. When someone tells us that a product helped them feel more comfortable wearing their natural texture, gave them confidence in styling their own hair or made them excited about their routine again, that’s incredibly meaningful. It reminds us that we’re not simply developing another shampoo, gel or treatment — we’re creating tools that can help someone feel more confident in the hair that naturally grows from their head.
Aunt Jackie’s was originally built on a deep understanding of natural hair frustrations and a mission to make high-quality, sulfate-free care accessible to everyone. How do you maintain that intimate, “trusted friend” brand personality while managing the massive, global scale of House of Cheatham’s manufacturing capabilities?
For us, scale should never mean losing intimacy. Aunt Jackie’s has always spoken to consumers in a way that feels approachable, relatable and solution oriented. As the brand grows globally, we protect that by continuing to start with the consumer rather than the product. Before we develop something new, we’re asking: What problem are we solving? What is she struggling with in her routine? What does she wish were easier? Consumer research and testing are especially important to us. We put concepts, ingredients, formats and claims in front of real consumers and listen closely to both what excites them and what creates hesitation. House of Cheatham’s scale then becomes an advantage because we can take those insights and translate them into accessible products with broad distribution. The goal is to have the capabilities of a global organization while still creating products that feel like Aunt Jackie’s understands exactly what you were dealing with in the bathroom that morning.
Your brand recently made waves by making its historic debut at New York Fashion Week by sponsoring BIPOC designers Bach Mai and Sami Miró. What did that milestone mean for your brand, and how does high-fashion representation trickle down to your everyday consumers?
New York Fashion Week was an exciting milestone because it placed textured hair exactly where it belongs — alongside fashion, beauty, culture and creativity on one of the world’s most visible stages. Partnering with designers like Bach Mai and Sami Miró also gave Aunt Jackie’s an opportunity to support diverse creative voices while demonstrating the versatility and beauty of textured hair in a high-fashion environment. But representation matters most when consumers can see themselves within it. The woman purchasing Aunt Jackie’s at her local beauty supply store or mass retailer should be able to look at those moments and recognize that her curls, coils and texture don’t exist outside of luxury or fashion — they are part of it. That’s what makes opportunities like NYFW bigger than a sponsorship. They help expand the visual language around textured hair and reinforce that our consumer deserves to see herself represented everywhere beauty and culture are being defined.
We have to talk about your recent 2026 milestone—winning a Glamour Global Beauty & Wellness Award for the Curl La La Bounce Back! Refreshing Serum in the curly and coily category. What was the development process like behind this specific formulation, and why do you think it is resonating so strongly with consumers right now?
Curl La La is especially meaningful to me because I had the honor of initiating this collection during my time as Brand Manager for Aunt Jackie’s. The development process was highly cross-functional. Brand, R&D, Packaging, Finance, Sales and other teams worked together to make sure we weren’t simply expanding a successful franchise — we were introducing products that addressed real gaps within the consumer’s styling routine. With Bounce Back! Refreshing Serum, we focused on a very real need: what happens to curls after wash day? Consumers invest significant time creating their style, but curls can lose moisture, definition and life between washes. They don’t necessarily want to start their routine over every time that happens. Bounce Back! gives consumers a way to refresh and revive their curls between wash days, which fits beautifully with the direction we’re seeing the category move. Consumers increasingly want products that make their routines more efficient and help extend the life of their styles. Having that work recognized by Glamour is incredibly rewarding because it validates something we believed throughout development: meaningful innovation doesn’t always have to make a routine more complicated. Sometimes the best innovation simply makes an existing routine easier.
True to the brand’s innovative nature, you recently expanded the fan-favorite Curl La La collection with powerhouse ingredients like Kalahari Melon and Cactus Water. How do your product development and sourcing teams identify these next-generation natural ingredients before they become major trends?
As Manager of Innovation, identifying the right ingredients is a critical part of the innovation and concepting process for me. It starts with a combination of consumer insight, cultural awareness, category intelligence, and strong collaboration with our R&D and sourcing partners. We’re constantly evaluating what’s happening both inside and outside textured hair care — emerging ingredients, skinification trends, consumer search behavior and ingredients gaining credibility in adjacent beauty categories. But an ingredient being trendy isn’t enough for us. We ask whether it has a meaningful reason to exist within the formula and whether consumers can intuitively connect the ingredients with the benefit we’re promising. Through research, we’ve seen that consumers are interested in discovering new ingredients, but they also want to understand why they’re there and what they’re going to do for their hair. That’s where ingredients like Kalahari Melon and Cactus Water become exciting. They allow us to introduce discovery and freshness while still grounding the product story in benefits that matter to textured-hair consumers, particularly moisture, hydration and manageability.
What can independent store owners do to better merchandise the newly expanded lines and award-winning serums to capture the attention of a customer who may already be familiar with your classic formulas?
I would encourage retailers to merchandise around the routine and the solution, not simply individual SKUs. One of Aunt Jackie’s greatest strengths is brand recognition. Many consumers already know and trust our hero products, so the opportunity for retailers is to show them what else Aunt Jackie’s can do for their routine. Keeping collections together allows consumers to immediately understand the system. Retailers can also use shelf communication to call attention to what’s new, highlight awards and clearly communicate the specific problem a product solves. For something like Bounce Back!, messaging around refreshing curls between wash days immediately gives the shopper a reason to reconsider the shelf even if she’s purchased Aunt Jackie’s for years. Independent beauty supply stores are also incredibly important spaces for discovery and education within textured hair care. Store owners and associates often have trusted relationships with their shoppers, so their recommendations can be powerful in helping an existing Aunt Jackie’s consumer discover the next product that belongs in her regimen.
What major shifts in consumer behavior are your marketing and research teams tracking right now that will dictate how Aunt Jackie’s approaches retail education and new launches over the next few years?
One of the biggest shifts we’re watching is how much more intentional consumers have become about their hair care routines. They have more choices than ever, so they’re looking for products that have a clear purpose, deliver noticeable results and fit easily into their everyday lives. We’re also seeing consumers move toward more simplified routines. They don’t necessarily want more products — they want the right products. That creates an opportunity for us to be very clear about what each product does, who it’s for and where it fits within a regimen. Discovery is changing as well. Consumers may first hear about an ingredient, technique or product on social media and then walk into a beauty supply store already knowing what they want to explore. At the same time, recommendations from trusted retailers, stylists, friends and family continue to carry tremendous influence. For Aunt Jackie’s, that means continuing to meet consumers wherever they are in their journey. Whether that’s through retail education, digital content or new product innovation, our goal is to make it easy for her to understand what the product does, why she needs it and how it can make her routine better.
Are there any new products, campaigns or partnerships you would like to share with our readers?
There is a lot happening at Aunt Jackie’s, and I’m particularly excited about how we’re continuing to evolve the brand around specific consumer needs. One area we’re continuing to explore is scalp health, growth and length retention, with innovation designed around the relationship between a healthy scalp, stronger hair and maintaining length. We’re also continuing to look at opportunities to simplify some of the most challenging parts of textured-hair routines, including detangling and wash day. What I can say is that our innovation pipeline continues to be grounded in the same principle that built Aunt Jackie’s: listen to the consumer first. Whether we’re exploring a new ingredient, format or regimen, we want consumers to immediately understand why that product deserves a place in their routine. There are some exciting things ahead, and I’m looking forward to consumers seeing what’s next.
