Silk or Lace explains its product showing three forearms lie side by side, and each wears three small rectangles of mesh labeled Ivory, Deep Tan and Deepest Tan. Founder Suran Yoo is making an argument at the same time she is selling an expensive product: for most of the modern history of the lace-front wig, the fine mesh that imitates a scalp came in one default shade, and women whose skin didn’t match it were left to dye it, powder it or hide it.

Yoo did not come to that problem as an industry analyst. She came to it as a customer. Yoo began losing her hair at 23, a change she connects to hormonal shifts, and the emotional toll sent her looking for a solution in a market she found confusing and fragmented. She started sharing her story online, found a community of women trying, as she puts it, to feel like themselves again, and eventually built a company around them.

Today Silk or Lace has five full-time employees, has grown between 10% and 20% a year without outside investors, and makes most of its money reselling lightly used hair pieces.

Her path follows an old patterns in business history, and one that appears to be accelerating: the founder whose own body did the market research.

A Nineteenth Century Founder Story In Beauty Began With A Bald Spot

In the 1890s, a St. Louis washerwoman named Sarah Breedlove noticed her hair falling out. Bald spots were common among women who worked long hours without running water, and Breedlove experimented with remedies until she had a scalp ointment she trusted. As Madam C.J. Walker , she turned that formula into one of the most successful Black-owned businesses of the early twentieth century, and she did it less by advertising a product than by building a network of trained sales agents who were often customers themselves.

Management scholars have a name for this sequence: user entrepreneurship, defined as people that develop a solution for their own need. In the path, the community is not a marketing channel added, but actually where the company is first tested.

Though business publications commonly underrated this kind of company as no more than expressions of femininity, historian Kathy Peiss has shown how that distinction shaped business for decades .

Femininity, Well-Being And A Market Hiding In Plain Sight

The market Yoo walked into is larger than most people assume. Her own condition, androgenetic alopecia, also called female pattern hair loss, becomes common with age. Alopecia areata, the autoimmune form , is rarer but still affects about 2.1% of people at some point in their lives.

The emotional cost also falls hardest on women. In a study that compared women and men with pattern hair loss, researchers found the condition stressful for both, but “substantially more distressing for women,” who reported worse body image and less effective coping.

This data all together helps explain why Yoo’s plans for 2027 center on social commerce, including anonymous forums where women can discuss the intimate parts of hair loss that they won’t raise under their own names.

Going Beyond The Hair Industry

Yoo’s story is one version of something founders tell across very different markets.

When I asked members of r/femalefounders , a Reddit community for women entrepreneurs, whether a personal health experience had led them to start a business, the replies came quickly.

A perfumer whose migraines are triggered by scent built a line people with scent sensitivities can wear; ten years later it sells in 600 stores. A founder dealing with perimenopause, ADHD and constant overstimulation created “nervous system fragrances.” A hypnotherapy app, after a migraine forced the founder to take a month off work. The founder of Sibyl created digital support for women going through pregnancy loss and infertility after her own losses. Others are building for support tools and platforms for women with endometriosis.

The motive can be preventive as well as personal.

Unrefined Foods , a Massachusetts family-owned company launched this summer, makes frozen muffins from organic, stone-milled whole grains sweetened only with maple syrup, as an alternative to the ultra-processed convenience food that co-founder Melissa Bermudez says parents shouldn’t have to settle for.

Femininity And Business Aren’t Mutually Exclusive. Women Founders Are Proving It

Two threads run through these stories.

The first is what the research on users being the entrepreneurs already described: the founder knows the problem from the inside, and that knowledge is the product.

The second is less often discussed, and it is gendered. For many of these founders, struggle is a woman’s struggle, conditions women have long managed privately. That experience shapes not only what these founders sell but how they build.

These are also the qualities that historians, and mostly feminist scholars, have identified in the feminine side of business, and these founders treat them as strengths rather than limits.