Tracee Ellis Ross talks Pattern Beauty, advocacy, and joy with Samira Nasr

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1:21Hi, everyone. Jeff Berman here. We at Masters of Scale were so fortunate to have actress, activist, advocate, and pattern beauty founder and co-CEO, Trace Ellis Ross, at our summit event this fall. She was joined on stage by Samira Nasser, editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar. In this episode, you'll hear the conversation these two brilliant minds recorded live at the Presidio Theater in San Francisco. Tracy and Samira are also dear friends, which happens to have been important in unlocking some key insights during their conversation. What you're about to hear reveals how Tracy is scaling her joy-driven business and how the support of people who love you can help unlock new perspectives on and new opportunities in your career.

2:14you gotta have incredible talent at every position it's like this huge push there are fires burning when you're going home can you believe it such an idiot and then you go back to this is totally going to be amazing there are so many easy ways i have no idea what to do sorry we made a mistake but you have to time it right oops working out of a three-bedroom apartment stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale.

2:53It's really wonderful to be here. I love this kind of conversation in this world of entrepreneurship and business building and also how we make the world a better place. Samira and I, just a little bit of background information. Samira and I have been best friends for 30 years. Genuine, genuine best friends and each other's barnacles, as we call it. So you are getting the privilege of seeing something that has never been done before. We have never sat on a stage together and had a conversation. Our relationship is a private one. So we will give you a public version of a conversation, but just wanted to orient you in the reality of our connection.

3:34Thank you. Thank you for setting us up like that. Okay, so I want to start. I want to jump right in because we have a limited amount of time. And I want to start with a quote that I read. And this is you speaking, obviously. You said, the premise of marketing is often you have a problem and you need this product in order to fix your problem. When you're talking about black people, black beauty, black hair, starting with this idea that there's a problem is problematic. I was thinking a lot about that and I was thinking about your trajectory. You launched Pattern in 2029. 2019. Sorry, 2019, excuse me.

4:10Not because you saw our hair as a problem, but because you saw the market as a problem. Tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got executives to see the value of your proposition. So my company is called Pattern Beauty. We are a beauty company. At the moment, we are hair care focused. That's where I purposefully called the company Pattern Beauty and not Pattern Hair because I had an expansive view of what I might dream of doing beyond hair. Right now, we are hair, but just for clarity. The journey came out of my own personal journey. My personal relationship with my hair, I could chronicle my journey of self-acceptance through my journey with my hair, but the most important factor there was that I didn't see myself mirrored back culturally.

4:56not in the beauty industry, and just not in the world. I definitely was mirrored back within my family, but I wasn't seeing it in the world. And so I came to entrepreneurship and business building from a perspective of being a consumer, which was incredibly helpful. I didn't join or decide to become an entrepreneur because I wanted to make money. I came because I was a consumer who wasn't seeing what I wanted. Some of it was that I saw an industry that was based on and marketing that to me was based on something that never made sense. I'm a shopper. I'm a consumer of beauty. I'm a consumer of pretty things.

5:34I can even go to the market and spend too much money. I'm a girl that can go to the 99 cent store and buying something for$100. So I always looked at it as when I feel good, I want to buy things. and I never understood why marketing was based on this idea that we have to make you feel bad in order to go buy something. I felt it was contrary. So progress through my journey as I started to build pattern, it was even more problematic because in a culture that, a culture of beauty and a society and a system that really is not set up for people of color to succeed, let alone be mirrored back and seen as beautiful and for authentic beauty to be celebrated, that equation was problematic but also not smart business.

6:27So to my own personal journey with Pattern, the beginning for me was, I will tell you what I originally said I wanted to set out to do and how the language has evolved as I have become a much smarter business person. So I started out by saying I wanted to make products that worked. There were so many products on the shelves, and I was like, but they don't work for textured hair that wants to wear its hair in the way it grows out of its head. By the way, one of the ways Samir and I met is our hair. True statement. True statement. Like, I literally used to find other people with hair like me and be like, what products do you use?

7:06Have you found anything that works? Yeah. That was sort of how we would lean in. And so in the beginning, it was just, I want products that work. I had spent all these years of my life, 10 years from when I had the idea to the company being born. But then all the years before that, discovering myself and my own journey around my hair. And I was like, I just want products that work. And I kept thinking as I was growing up, wouldn't it be neat if there were like a whole line of products that all worked, like they all work together and you wouldn't have to go and like buy one from each different company.

7:37and wouldn't it be amazing if they also all look pretty on the counter? And wouldn't it be amazing if the brush didn't break when you use it in your hair? And wouldn't it be neat if you could like refill them? Wouldn't it be amazing if like when you were in the shower, the conditioner wouldn't slip out of your hands because you could hold it? Like there were all these things that I was dreaming before I knew that I could be an entrepreneur. And then we got to the point where the other piece of it was around marketing. What it has evolved to is my mission of the brand. I'm trying to talk quick.

8:05I see that clock moving because I can talk about this stuff forever. What it evolved to was pattern beauty exceeds the needs of the curly, coily, and tight textured community. I will just unpack that a little bit for you because it's incredibly important to me to explain. I don't believe that hair has a gender or a race. However, textured hair, curly, coily, and tight textures, there are specific things that we need that other hair does not. A lot of moisture, clumping, slip, many things, the difference in hydration and moisture. So the products are specifically designed and built for the effectiveness of curly, coily, and tight textured hair.

8:46However, anyone can use our products. If you are a person who has, needs a lot of hydration, patterns for you, if you, you know what I mean? Like, and, and I wanted to be a company that also serviced this massive community, this vast amount of people in a way that we were there for you in every moment of your journey. Every day, every moment, we were a company that could support you. We were a brand and products that could support you in that. The other half of it and the evolution of what I originally called, I want to create a paradigm shift in how people are marketed to and specifically how black people are marketed to, is that we are centered around the celebration of black beauty.

9:29So those two things for me and our mission are inextricably tied in that we make products that are for the curly, coily, and tight textured community, but our content, our hiring, our team, and what we make is centered around the celebration of Black Beauty. There has been for eons and in the history of time, I have had to see myself mirrored back not in me. So marketing for products that I use don't have people that look like me. And I feel like anybody can see somebody that does look like Samira and I and other variations of blackness and also figure out the products that we're making work for them.

10:05So we are centered around the celebration of black beauty and we make products that exceed the needs of the curly, coiling, tight texture community. Next question.

10:22That brings me to my next question. Okay. Because there's a lot of joy in what you do and your approach. And I'm hoping you can talk to us a little bit about why that is so essential and why that is so essential for you to focus pattern beauty around this idea of joy. The first place it starts is my mama. So y 'all know me as Tracee Ellis Ross. That's how I was introduced. I was born Tracee Joy Silverstein. And my real middle name is Joy. and my mother said that's the way I came out. It is my natural state. I will tell you that the magnitude of joy that I hold in my body is also met with the other end of the spectrum.

11:04I have learned to hold both. I'm an actor. I can hold both ends, but my true nature is joy. Quick little cute story. My mom, when I went and became an actor and joined SAG and I became Tracy Ellis Ross and I put Ellis in because it's my father's name and I wanted him to have a claim to me when I was up on a screen. He's Robert Ellis Silverstein. So I'm Tracy Ellis Ross. But my mom was like, ah, you just threw away the joy. And I was like, no, mom, I just, I really wanted, I wanted dad's name. And she said, no, no, Tracy, it's okay. You've embodied it. So it is my true state. It is also, I believe, one of my superpowers.

11:42And it is, to me, at the core of everything I do. And I have a larger mission outside of Pattern. my mission with Pattern is to dispel the myth that black hair care is a niche market. My mission as a human being is to join the chorus of people who are making the world safer and more just for everybody to be comfortable in their skin and be who they are.

12:06That being said, at the core of Pattern is, and one of our taglines, is juicy and joyful. I believe that hair can be juicy and joyful. I believe you can live a juicy and joyful life. I believe you can have juicy, enjoyable friendships. And I really think that that, to me, is what holds the larger container for marketing that is based on celebrating who we are and not leaning into the problem. There's this thing that people talk about as an entrepreneur and as a founder of what is your promise? And to me, the promise is around celebrating and empowering who people are as opposed to shaming them into buying the thing that you want them to buy.

12:48I'll give you that. Can I ask you a question now? Yeah, you can ask me a question.

12:56I have the more public version of a job. Samira as an editor-in-chief obviously is public, but obviously I'm an actor. So this is not Samira's favorite place sitting and being asked questions, but I'm going to do this anyway. So there's a phrase that I think we've all heard throughout our lives that obviously was written by a man that behind every great man is a great woman. I'm not going to lie. It makes me want to barf. The question I have really is, what does it take and who holds the success of any human? I want to bring that up because there is something incredibly special that 30 years of friendship, and I will also say, Samira has a beautiful adopted child, little man Lex, who's not so little anymore, but we are both single women and our friendship group is very much what anchors us.

13:47Samira and I have had the absolute honor and blessing of 30 years of holding each other, holding space for each other, being there in the private moments, not the public moments that allows me to go out and be this huge human that I am out in the world, to do some of the scariest things and them to not feel scary, to have a sounding board and to have somebody who can love me when I can't love myself. Somebody can see the biggest part of me when I feel like the smallest part of me. So my question is, from your point of view, what has our friendship allowed and made space for in your career? And then I want to answer it too.

14:29Okay. Well, I think our friendship, you, have held space for me and um you've held dreams for me that I never would have dared to hold for myself and and case in point is the my current job I if you told me one day you're going to be editor-in-chief of a luxury media brand I would have been like okay um but it's something you always saw for me and you would always talk to me about it and I would always change the subject because that's what I like to do. And I think our friendship has anchored me. I think you've held space for me to see things that I could not see for myself. And I think ultimately, and I imagine that a lot of you feel this way also, these roles are very isolating and they're lonely.

15:21And it's challenging sometimes to be the first to do something or to imagine something that hasn't existed before. And so our friendship has been that safe place where I could go back because there is no blueprint, right? And we could talk through certain things and like, what do you think? A sounding board. And there's never shame. There's never like, you don't know that. It's sort of like, huh, let's figure that out together. And that's what it continues to be for me. Samira Nassar is the first.

15:52Samira is the first black editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar. She's setting an example. Thank you. of what a fashion magazine can be by expanding the definition of what is cover worthy, whose stories are worthy of being told. I have always believed that Samira should be an editor in chief. I will just quickly say, I wrote a letter cold to Anna Wintour. She did. She did. I did. The Glamour magazine editor in chief position opened up. We all heard about it publicly and I got my fingers moving and just randomly sent an email to Anna Winter and told her that Samira Nassar should be the editor-in-chief of Glamour Magazine.

16:32I didn't get the job.

16:36But my best friend went on, like, actually wrote a letter. Oh yeah, I full-on wrote a letter. Unsolicited. Unsolicited. No one asked me to. I will also tell you that there, it is a lonely job in whatever position you're in. If you're an entrepreneur and you are that person, if you're the editor-in-chief, if you are a CEO, ultimately the decisions come down to you. And I don't mind that. I am okay with that. But there are moments of trepidation, of fear. And who do you go to? You can't always go to your colleagues. They're not the appropriate people to go to. If there are hiring issues, HR issues, whatever those things are that are happening, who do you go to?

17:12And I think it's a really important part of business that a lot of people don't talk about. And there were a couple of moments, I was so frustrated what was happening, marketing, and we ended up, we kept ending up in the same place every Christmas with a campaign that I was not comfortable with. And I was just exasperated with not knowing how to communicate what I wanted. And I called Samir and I was like, okay, do you have five minutes? She was like, yeah, okay, listen, I need to just walk you through what's happening. I need to walk you through what's going on. And then you can just, I just, I, can I just say it all?

17:39Do you have time for me to say it all? She said, yes. And I walked it through, she was like, oh, you need a 360 digital meeting. And I was like, yes, I do. I need a 360 digital meeting. Thank you, Samira. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Hi, can we schedule a 360 digital meeting, please? Literally how it works. Yeah. And there, you know, there's these places where, and part of the thing, entrepreneur, entree, you're learning, I'm new, you know, and one of the things I love is that growth curve, right? I have language and I know things now that I did not know then. And some of it comes from being open to knowing I don't know everything.

18:18And who do you ask? Who are those people who you trust how they operate in their lives? You trust the integrity with which they do things. You trust their decision-making process, how they reason things out. And that to me has been the biggest learning curve is making sure that the correct people are around you in order to find those spaces of safety. More with Tracy and Samira in just a minute.

18:57Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25. If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.

19:47And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

20:31So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can see this conversation and more from our 2024 summit on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. I have another question for you. Yes. Okay. I would like to know, I mean, I'd love to hear this from all of you, but I'm asking her the question. But I would love for you to all think about this as well. What is the one lesson that you've learned in the last five years that you're glad you didn't know before you embarked on this journey? Oh. Right? Yeah. I never had a doubt of the, I think this is the answer.

21:19I never had, for the moment, this is the answer. I never had a doubt. Part of being an actor and as I've built pattern has been knowing that my idea was valid and worthy. Same way you go into an audition. Like I know I deserve this role. I don't know if I'll get it. I have now built a multi-million dollar company. I now, we have 11 retail partners. We had seven SKUs. We now have over 57 SKUs. We have three tools that plug into the wall. I have 49 designated employees and then multiple other shared employees and people we work with. I did not know then the stakes that now exist. And I have to remind myself of those texts because they are important.

22:17There are now other people's livelihoods involved. There are now larger choices on the table and maintaining the optionality of how do I stay true to my mission of joining a chorus of people trying to make the world a better place, basically, and a safer place with more resources, with more abundance, with more people accountable to me. with me being responsible for more. And I'm glad I didn't know that then. I've always been comfortable with a high stakes life, but those stakes change how decisions are made. And I don't know that I would have, I don't know, I think I would have been the same person.

23:02I think I would have had the same dream. I think I would have gone about the same things. This is totally personal, but it's totally true. If you had told me at 25 that I was not going to be married at 52 with like four kids, I would have been like, and it doesn't matter, right? And so it's just a larger example of another thing of the dreams I had as a young girl. Number one, I really wish culturally that we would do better at supporting young girls, young children in dreaming in different ways.

23:46So many of the people that are here, so many of the people around you, so many of the people that are speaking have jobs and have figured out spaces in the world that you're not taught to dream of, right? So I want to be a fireman or a policeman. I want to dream of my wedding. Like dream of your life. Dream of how you want to make, what do you want to contribute? What do you want people to feel when you leave the room? If you're going to build a company, what do you want people to take away from that other than buying something? What experience do you want them to have? What feeling do you want them to get?

24:25What do you want them to be validated in knowing about themselves because you did this or you sold them that? so I think had I known some of those things I wonder if I would have been more empowered to have a even different kind of boldness what do you think about for you like is there a job what do you think you've learned from where you've been that you wish you had known or you would have done something different I don't know if it's that I would have done anything differently but I do, and this is something I've always held, but I have such a deeper appreciation for. So I don't know if it really answers your question, but it's the value of people.

25:11And I think it comes from a place of being othered, right? And wanting to create a space of belonging. And I think that the value of people in achieving any kind of meaningful success and having a good day is that you have to carry that value and respect for people and what they bring to the work. I think I've learned a lot about that. We have 14 seconds. I think one of the things that I have learned at 52, next week, 52, whatever. No, no, no, it's just like at this point. No, no, we celebrate them. We celebrate them. I feel like at a certain point you're like, I'm 50-ish. is that, and I did not know this as a child, the world is run by people.