The Business of Beauty Global Forum: Tracee Ellis Ross on Community and the Power of Celebrating Differences

NAPA, CALIFORNIA — When actress and Pattern Beauty founder and CEO Tracee Ellis Ross was growing up, she often wondered if one day her counter could be lined by products that actually worked for her natural, textured hair.

“Little did I know,” she said on stage at The Business of Beauty Global Forum in Napa Valley, California, “I was beginning my entrepreneurial, business-building, experiential [journey] to put together what became my brand Bible before I even met my partners.”

Ross sat down with The Business of Fashion founder and editor-in-chief Imran Amed Tuesday to discuss the meaning of community, and how to create a brand that is rooted in celebrating its customers’ differences rather than shared aspirations dictated by culture.

The story of Ross’ business began in her childhood, when it was rare to see Black women’s natural hair on television. Back then, beauty products geared for natural hair framed curly, textured hair as a problem to be fixed, rather than a style to be emphasised or celebrated. It was this lack in representation of Black hair that drove Ross to dream of building Pattern Beauty.

It was not an easy start. Ross drew initial scepticism when she eschewed the traditional route of partnering with hair stylists. “Mostly, stylists had actually gotten my hair in trouble,” she said. “They were not the people that taught me how to wear my hair naturally. The history of my family, the legacy of my life and others … and my own trial and error is how I discovered what worked for my hair.”

Even so, Ross, who does not have a business background — she said that initially she didn’t even know what a C suite was, joking, “Don’t you want to be in the ‘A suite’?” — has scaled her six-year-old brand by focussing on the message that everyone’s hair is unique.

“I don’t want anybody to have my hair. I want people to have their hair. And the point is that they need to find the right products to support their hair, and that’s what [didn’t] exist,” Ross said. Pattern is now stocked at the likes of Ulta Beauty, Sephora and Boots.

When it came to actually creating Pattern’s product formulations, Ross selected manufacturers based in Los Angeles with whom she would work in close, face-to-face proximity, and personally tested 75 samples for the company’s first seven SKUs.

Ross remains heavily involved in product testing and recently learned there isn’t just an absence in products for textured hair, but a glaring gap in the methodology for these products in the testing phase itself.

Last year, Ross learned that the lab Pattern used had eliminated testing for what’s known as “type-four hair,” or the most tightly coiled of hair textures, because the testing instruments were not effective. In response, Ross and Pattern Beauty VP of product development Ni’Kita Wilson worked with the lab to create workarounds, such as using silicon fingers that imitated consumers’ fingers as they run through their hair and wide-tooth combs in lieu of the fine-tooth ones used before.

The testing laboratory now implements the solutions Pattern Beauty helped to engineer as the standard method for testing curly hair.

To Ross, a business that is centred on customers of colour, even amid broad rollbacks in DEI, is not only possible, but profitable. Calling on people to remember their humanity in whatever role they assume, she said, “To me, the diversity of our humanity is what makes our world great. And in all honesty, it’s also really good business.”

The Business of Beauty Global Forum 2025 is made possible in part by our partners Front Row, Unilever Prestige, Citi, McKinsey & Company, Getty Images, Grown Alchemist and Stanly Ranch and our awards partners L’Oréal Groupe and Sephora. If you are interested in learning about partnership opportunities, please contact us here.