Nikki Eslami is no stranger to breaking paradigms.
In 2012, when influencer marketing was nascent, Instagram was still fledgling and hair extensions weren’t recognized as a key piece of the beauty industry pie, Eslami, a law school graduate, founded Bellami to forge her own path. Quickly, the business gained speed.
“It became this marketing engine — and back then, I reflect on that ignorance of not having been brought up in the industry. It gave me the ability to potentially look for solutions in ways that someone who had started in the industry as an intern typically wouldn’t,” Eslami said. “It started this pioneering social media marketing with influencers, which was totally unheard of at the time.”
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And to her point, the market opportunity was untapped. Since then, Eslami and cofounder Julius Salerno sold Bellami to L Catterton for an undisclosed sum last year, with the latter citing that only 15 to 20 percent of hairdressers offer extensions, and only 3 percent of women use them.
Before the exit, though, “I remember executives saying you can’t buy hair online, it’s not scalable, it’s impossible,” Eslami said. “I’m a person who wants to take a problem and find a solution because there’s always something you can get to. Maybe that comes from my legal training, and it helped the trajectory of building a brand and a career.”
Of the sale, she said “that was the first time the industry recognized that hair extensions are a massive industry in beauty — it’s here today, and it’s not going anywhere.”
In her next move, Eslami is hoping to spin her successes and failures into advice for other women-led businesses. “I started to think about all of the things I had from building a brand. How can I accelerate that in a way where I can also work with other women? I experienced that firsthand, how vastly underrepresented we are in beauty, and underfunded. You can walk into a room, and nine out of 10 times, it’s nine male executives to one woman. That was the birth of New Theory Ventures.”
Just as pioneering in spirit as Bellami, New Theory Ventures has invested in Ceremonia and Female Invest, according to its website, to start. “The majority of our investments are diverse founder-led brands that are also making the world a better place,” Eslami said. “The question I was tossing around was, can brands be more than just a product? Can they talk about things on the surface, or can they really drive the path? When New Theory came to the forefront, that was the critical point as well — every brand needed to have some impact.”
Eslami also sits on the mental health council for Rare Beauty, Selena Gomez’s makeup brand.
“Selena herself wanted to build something that was destigmatizing mental health at its core — that’s also the love of products and having products that don’t hide who you are,” she said. “That marketing engine brings attention and increases access to mental health services for young people and creates a robust conversation.”
As she learned with Bellami, “when it comes to driving growth in brand or business, it’s always being anchored in your brand DNA and values.”