TIARA broke the mold when it launched with its patented shower cap design, offering people a better and more sustainable alternative to one-time use plastic shower caps. But after 4 years on the market, and in the midst of a global pandemic, TIARA founder Zuly Matallana knew TIARA could do more for women, and mean more for women around the world.
Zuly’s first step was reenvisioning her brand. She wanted the business to be able to expand beyond shower caps, to include all kinds of natural and sustainable products to ease the daily lives of women. And she wanted a central pillar of her business’s ethos to focus on supporting women, not just in its products, but in how it operates each day.
Zuly tapped ELLA, the Entrepreneurial Leadership Learning Alliance, to help oversee her rebrand. ELLA provides six-month accelerator programs led by women for female business owners. With ELLA’s guidance, Zuly went on to work with marketing agency Futureproof Inc. to further define characteristics of TIARA’s brand identity, and Shopify, through its small business program, to relaunch TIARA’s website to better serve, inform and support the company’s community of customers.
The new branding was symbolic of Zuly’s desire to take the business beyond reusable shower caps. While shower caps were a major entry point into the world of sustainable plastics (there are currently 7.3 billion disposable shower caps sold in the U.S. alone each year), Zuly knew there was so much more she could create to make the world a healthier place, and ensure women felt like queens during their daily routines. So TIARA set its sight on a new frontier: the bedroom. (What good is a blowout when you wake up with bedhead?) TIARA’s latest innovation, the Night Cap, is made from premium silk satin with a soft cotton band securing it around the hairline. When worn at night, the cap reduces the friction between your pillow and hair, which causes tangles, kinks and breakage. When used in tandem with the TIARA Shower Cap, the TIARA Night Cap can help extend the life of a blowout by several days. (Talk about beauty sleep.)
Next on Zuly’s mission to reimagine the business was a new, modern logo. Zuly entrusted the award-winning design leader and consultant Alison Phillips to re-envision the TIARA logo. Alison brought years of experience, working on notable brands like BlackBerry, Club Monaco and Aritzia, to the project, and produced a new logo and design befitting royalty.
With more than 50,000 happy customers, and business partnerships throughout Canada, the United States, Germany, Mexico and Belgium, TIARA’s loyal following is expanding globally, and with new products, too. Bolstered by the satisfaction of TIARA’s customers, the company is continuing to develop new, natural haircare products that celebrate individuality and is committed to creating a better, healthier world. In the future, TIARA devotees can look forward to natural shampoo and conditioner, dry shampoo (to help get the most out of a blowout) and deodorant (because the only thing worse than a bad hair day is bad BO).
After conquering the world of hair care with a single invention, Zuly could have easily hung up her hat (or shower cap as it were) and call it a day, but her passion for creation and her devotion to her community spurred her forward. With a team of like-minded, talented women at her side, Zuly was able to dream bigger, and transform TIARA into a global business, dedicated to saving the environment and improving the day-to-day lives of women everywhere.
From its earliest ideation, TIARA was focused on changing day-to-day lives with a seemingly simple product: a shower cap that actually worked to keep hair dry, and fit snugly around the hairline with a terry lining to avoid unsightly creases. But TIARA’s creator, Zuly Matallana, had an underlying mission that was a bit more complicated: she wanted to change the world. Over seven billion disposable plastic shower caps are sold each year in the U.S. alone. Zuly knew if she could create a sustainable alternative, designed using 100% recycled materials, she could make a meaningful reduction to the plastics ending up in landfills.
With the TIARA Shower Cap extending the life of blowouts, Zuly discovered women could skip two hair washes per week, which may not sound like a big deal, but in the course of a year, the environmental impact would be (pardon our dad joke) hair raising. By skipping two hair washes per week for a year, women could save over 4,000 litres of water, reduce energy use by 169.52 kWh (that’s enough energy to light a normal bulb for 15 days straight!), cut CO2 emissions by 78 kg and reduce at least 100 MT of plastic waste by swapping disposable plastic shower caps for a sustainable option. Plus, by skipping those washes for a year, you’ll save an extra 624 minutes in the morning.