Is Texture ID Black Owned? What We Found Out
Texture ID makes some great Black hair products at the intersection of low price and high quality, from their Coils Detangling series of shampoos, conditioners, and creams to their Intense Moisturizing Leave-in Conditioner.
But is Texture ID Black owned? Should we be spending our money on them? We look into it.
Contents
What Is Texture ID?
Texture ID is not its own company – it is a brand owned by Sally Beauty. However, it represents the arm of Sally Beauty that focuses on Black hair care and products.
Officially, Texture ID was not made for Black hair alone. But its focus on a natural, textured look coupled with its Black-dominated (but not exclusive) advertisements makes it pretty clear that they are focusing their attention on Black hair.
The brand currently has 30 products offered on its website, including a range of cleaning, moisturizing, conditioning, and styling products that focus on different aspects of natural hair.
In general, it looks like the categories they try to serve are coiled hair, curly hair, wavy hair, with some products geared towards moisturizing without a specific style focus.
What Is Sally Beauty?
Because Texture ID is just a brand, there is no question of whether it is Black-owned– what matters for that question is Sally Beauty.
Sally Beauty has been around since the founder established its first store in New Orleans in 1964. It grew like a bamboo wildfire, creating ten new stores in the next five years.
In 1969, a consumer products company called Alberto-Culver purchased the nascent brand, stoking the growth even further. Between 1969 and 1982, Sally Beauty started growing even more aggressively, using acquisitions alongside traditional growth to arrive at 119 stores.
A little over 20 years after it was founded, Sally Beauty opened its 500th store and began its first international venture in the UK by taking over 30 existing beauty stores.
In the four following years, Sally Beauty used a ruthlessly expansive business strategy, and by 1991, they had doubled their store count from 1987 from 500 to 1000.
The rest of their history continues like this, expanding and acquiring their way into higher store counts and new countries and territories.
Due to its relentlessly expansive spirit, Sally Beauty has grown into an enormous multinational retailer and manufacturer. They make over 8,000 products through more brands than you can count (including Texture ID), and sell even more in their stores.
They also operate many stores across the globe– they operate over 5,000 stores in the US, Canada, Peru, France, Germany, the UK, Chile, Belgium, and still more countries.
Suffice to say, Sally Beauty is not a player to be ignored.
Who Owns Sally Beauty?
This question is a little complicated since Sally Beauty is a publicly-traded company. That means that technically its “ownership” lies in the hands of its stockholders, who aren’t identified by race.
That said, the better question here is who runs Sally Beauty? There are two parts of this: the executive team and the board of directors.
The Sally Beauty Executive Team
The executive team is more important for the everyday decisions that the company makes and are the main people who will benefit when Texture ID makes more money.
The company’s executive team has ten members and all of them are white.
Denise Paulonis is the Director and Chief Executive Officer. She is a white woman with decades of experience bouncing around different executive teams in the retail industry.
She’s also relatively new to this company– she joined the board of directors in 2018 and was then appointed Director and CEO in October 2021.
In sum, Paulonis is wealthy, powerful, and likely profits the most out of anyone from the company’s success.
Like many companies, Sally Beauty has a President in addition to its CEO– his name is John Goss. He is a white man, and he has a similar background to the CEO. He has spent years in different high-level retail positions and this is his latest venture.
The Sally Beauty Board of Directors
The board of directors is the group that makes the significant, big-picture decisions that the company confronts. It is slightly bigger than the executive team, with 12 members, including the company’s aforementioned CEO and Director.
Most of the members of this board are visibly white, though one or two appear to potentially be mixed or non-white in their profile pictures for the website.
It isn’t worth our time in answering this question to dive into the racial background of every key decision-maker trying to figure out exactly how Black or non-Black they are. That work is pointless– both because it’s bad for the person we’re investigating (especially if they are Black) and because it doesn’t help us.
What’s much more important is this: the vast majority of leaders at Sally Beauty (and therefore Texture ID), as well as its whole executive team, is visibly white.
That means two things: first, every dollar you spend on Texture ID products ultimately lands in the pockets of white people.
Second, the company has no value for diversity– even businesses with a traditionally anti-diversity outlook have non-white people on their executive teams. Sally Beauty does not.
Is Texture ID Black Owned? Final Thoughts
No, Texture ID is not Black-owned. Pretty clearly, nearly every person (and maybe everyone) in a key decision-making position at Sally Beauty is white.
Does this mean that their hair care products for Black hair are bad? Not necessarily– they might have Black employees at the head of the brand itself, who could have brought the unique perspective it needs to effectively work on Black hair.
The bigger question is whether you want to buy from and support them. That part is up to you, but ask yourself before you buy one of their products: after everything that natural Black hair has been through from non-Black people, do you want to support a white-owned Black hair brand?
There are so many Black-owned natural hair brands to choose from. Texture ID is not one of them.
