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The beauty entrepreneur who made the Jheri curl a sensation


The hairstyle originally involved an expensive trip to a salon. Then Comer Cottrell introduced the Curly Kit during the 1980s recession.

In the early ’80s, the Pro-Line Curly Kit provided a perfect case study for this phenomenon in action — and showed how, with the right product, tough times can create lightning in a bottle for an entire market category. Cottrell hired a cosmetic chemist to devise a two-step retail formula that used one solution to soften the hair and another to create a loose and defined curl, allowing users to bypass an expensive and time-consuming trip to the salon. Every three weeks like clockwork, he flew from Columbus to Newark Airport, drove up to his company’s Long Island warehouse, and spent the next few days hauling Curly Kits to SuperX and Kmart stores along the I-95 corridor.

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