Alicia and Stepahenie are the co-founders and brainchild of SOTRO (Salon on the Road), which is an innovative, dynamic, and revolutionary 2-in-1 micro-mist hair steamer + hooded hair dryer. These ladies used their natural hair care experiences to bring awareness to a gaping hole in the beauty market: innovative tech solutions for natural hair. While the shelves are full of products with promising solutions for our curly, coily, and wavy haircare woes, they lack tools to enhance our texture.
Alicia and Stephanie created SOTRO to help bridge this gap by helping stylists and consumers feel empowered to treat their hair from the comfort of their homes. Long gone are the days of sore arms and necks trying to power through wash day, SOTRO helps consumers maintain a regular hair routine that repairs hair loss and moisturize with salon-grade styling results.
We sat down to chat with the blossoming co-founders about the creativity behind SOTRO, the landscape of tech in haircare, and what we can expect from their upcoming debut at ESSENCEFest 2024.
When did you meet as co-founders, and what are your roles within your company?
Stephanie: We met five years ago when Alicia won a contest that allowed the winner to visit the best ten salons in New York City. We were the first salon that Alicia visited, and we started to bond through these vulnerable conversations regarding her hair blog.
Alicia: When I ran this blog, I started right out of college to encourage people to be comfortable wearing their natural hair at work in every setting. It was right when the natural hair movement started, and people were wearing their natural hair but straightening it again for work.
I wanted to help resolve that dichotomy, so I decided to be like a sacrificial lamb for the New York hair community that summer. I will try all these salons and tell you how they are. But I went to Stephanie’s Salon and never went anywhere else.
Stephanie: Regarding our roles, we’re in the early stages, so that ebbs and flows. We both handle everything. But if we had to break it down, I’d be more CEO and operations, and Alicia’s would be more CRO and marketing.
Stephanie, between 2019 and 2021, you had a natural hair journey that was the foundation for SOTRO’s ideation. What did you learn about your haircare routine during that time?
I can handle business professionally, but I can be lazy about self-care. Hair care is one of those things that feels like a cute chore. So anyway, can I try to escape it? Having natural hair felt like a task, so outside of having it done for the salon, I never took care of my hair. Even though I owned a salon, I still didn’t even go to the salon as regularly as I could. I’m swamped, and there’s just no time. And, like anything, it worsens when you don’t take care of it.
For the first time in my life, I started losing hair and chunks of it. And then I got a bald spot. And so, at that point, I was like, oh, no. Like, how did we get here? I went to lots of dermatologists and then was finally diagnosed with a form of alopecia called CA.
Even though I had this bald spot, she was like, yeah, don’t worry about it. We can still reverse it with medicine. But one thing you’re going to have to do is take care of your hair. I can give you all the medication in the world, but it’s not going to change the fact that if you go through these same habits again, you’ll find yourself right back here and then. There’ll be a point where we can’t reverse it.
Now I gotta do the thing I haven’t been doing forever, and I started with the fact that I’m lazy because I was trying to think through why it is that like I don’t do this right. I could just walk to the salon if I want to, it’s a 5 minute walk away. I don’t have to pay for it cause I own it. So, what prevented me from doing it was that it always felt like work, even though someone else was doing it. And then I would have to get myself in whatever comfortable position I was on my couch right to go over there and then sit in a salon space.
I thought if I could think through how to make this accessible when you’re at home with salon-level quality, then maybe I would do it more. These are like the beginning stages of what would ultimately be our tool line. Skincare has seen a surge in self-care as part of how people do these routines; hair care doesn’t have that.
Alicia, you started hair steaming in 2019. How did this change your haircare routine, and what were the benefits of diffusing or air drying?
Prior to 2019, I’ve always had long hair, like shoulder length, and now it’s longer than that. I always had a routine where it was good: I’d cut it, wear a protective style, and then have to restart growing it out. When I started regularly steaming my hair, it became more manageable, so I was able to be more consistent when I couldn’t go to the salon.
Steaming has been an additional step that I was missing in my hair journey. It keeps my hair moisturized and makes it easy for me to manage on my own. I would say it’s very different from air drying and diffusing because those were more of the final steps, whereas this was for having my styles look good in between wash days.
How did you come up with the name and design for SOTRO?
Stephanie: SOTRO stands for (Salon On the Road), which indicates tools and solutions for people on the go. We wanted to think of a very memorable name, like Coca-Cola or Kodak. Second, we wanted to reinforce this concept of an accessible salon concept that you can take anywhere with you. We felt like that was very representative of the types of tools and solutions we would end up building for people. Regardless of their destination, location, or stylist, they could always have their salon with them to meet their hair care needs.
What has been your biggest challenge as co-founders entering a crowded haircare market?
Stephanie: It’s an exciting time. One can look at crowded as a limiting step, but the conversations are changing now to your point about Cécred, FentyHair, TPH, and Flawlessby GU. All of these brands, right? Like there’s a conversation about what your natural hair is doing and how we can enhance that.
It’s not crowded for us because very few people are taking a hardware approach to that. But the fact that we are in a space and in a time right now with curly hair is a market opportunity that people are actually recognizing. We all have this curly hair for what, like the other.
You’ve got all these products, and they are great, but without the tools to optimize them, they could not work as well for you as they should. How can we help your products perform better? How can we help you maintain a better hair care routine? Like how? We get to be that gap. We see that this is the right time for SOTRO to exist; we couldn’t exist before people had the desire and the language to be able to care for their hair.
What was a game-changing moment for your company?
Stephanie: The first game-changing moment was when we came together with our diverse backgrounds and combined our passion for improving hair care for other people. We could take a napkin-drawn concept to a fully functional prototype, and that first day that we plugged it in and it worked…was a big deal.
Image Source: @sotroinnovations
Another hallmark was winning this manufacturing grant that New York State sponsors. It’s designed for robotics and high-end tech, and we almost won first place, which made us realize that we are innovators. Sometimes, it takes someone to recognize you in a space you would not think is a traditional place to go.
Being a winner of the “Lift as We Climb” grant from Gabrielle Union was a personal and professional victory because she’s a legendary actress. Pitching to her was one milestone, but having her support our vision has been an unforgettable experience. Our next big moment will be debuting our product at ESSENCEFest 2024.
How does combining a hair steamer and hooded dryer improve a person’s hair health?
Alicia: Many of us have alternatives for drying, whether starting with an air dryer or using a diffuser. Then you have the hooded cap or dryer I used to have in my house, so to say there are many options to dry your curls, coils, and waves is an understatement. When we thought about this, we wanted steaming to be a tool that people introduced to their routine, and the best way to do that and educate our consumers about that is to marry it with a product they’re used to.
When they see a dryer and a steamer, they’re like, shouldn’t this be the same machine? And we figured out a way to do that so that people aren’t shelling out all this money to have a whole salon worth the products in their house. We can simplify it to one. With that, we’re really on this mission to emphasize the importance of steaming so that people can have a similar experience that I had where I realized this was the missing link in my routine that really brought it all together and then provided them with the tool that they’re used to for an optimal experience there as well.
Adjusting your haircare regimen revolutionized both hair experiences; what advice would you give to people who are scared or hesitant to try a new tool?
Stephanie: Having a built-in trust with the community makes these sorts of arguments easier, and that’s something we’re building. As we build, we will invite people into our hair care routine, and people will get to follow us and see how regular steaming sessions and drying sessions with the SOTRO machine.
Many companies are trying to zero in on a core tenant of hair care that can only be resolved with moisturizing. You want your hair to be healthy, and products with this water percentage are excellent. Still, if you don’t have a foundation where your hair can absorb this moisture, retain it, and do that consecutively, you won’t see a difference.
Alicia: For people with curly hair, the tighter the curl, the higher the stakes when trying out a new product or tool. You have one shot each week to do your hair, and you’re like, alright, are you going to work, or should I just stick with what I know will make me look good? Our product will allow you to have maybe even the opportunity to have two do-overs in a week, right? If you come out of the shower and it’s messed up like I’m going to go right under the steamer, try again, and it’ll be more accessible than the first time I did it.
Your brand is focused on making “hair care accessible to everyone.” How do you plan to execute that philosophy in the future?
Image Source: @sotroinnovations
Stephanie: You spoke about affordability earlier in this call, and I think that is one high barrier to accessibility. So we want to introduce our tool, which we have priced accordingly. It’s two tools in one, giving you some long results, and it’s travel-friendly.
The innovation alone has a commensurate cost, right? But we want to make it affordable. Not everybody can spend hundreds of dollars on a tool at once, so we want to offer buy-now, pay-later plans out of the gate. That is very important for us. We’ll eventually implement a rental plan as well.
We’ll be seeing SOTRO at ESSENCEFest 2024 at the NaturallyCurly booth. What can we expect from your partnership?
Alicia: I think the inspiration behind what we wanted to do at ESSENCEFest 2024 is to give people a taste of what it would feel like to have our machine in their home, just to be able to block everything out and let something else do the work while you. You can focus on something else while your hair is getting taken care of. We’re really trying to bring that relaxation aspect of it as well, and the specific meditation that we’re doing really reframes the idea of wash day.
I think for most of us, it feels like a chore. It feels like work. I have been putting it off for way too long—even me just right now. And I’m a co-founder. But you know, just reframing that, you get to do your hair, and it’s exciting and it’s good. And you’re happy to do it, and it won’t be hard today.
