A Letter From Our Founder

Today, I finally get to introduce you to Soulstice.

It's difficult to put into words what this moment means to me. I've spent more than a decade of my life in haircare, and the last year and a half building Soulstice from the ground up. What began as an idea has become something very real and something I’ve poured an extraordinary amount of myself into.

I've been deeply involved in every part of it, from developing formulas and testing textures to choosing colors, packaging, scent, imagery, and the feeling I wanted this brand to bring into your life.

In many ways, Soulstice began with everything I learned the first time I became a founder. When I started my first haircare company, I was new to the beauty industry. I had never worked in product development or marketing, and I learned so much by doing, making mistakes, asking questions, and figuring things out along the way. It was an incredible chapter of my life, but it was also a demanding one.

For a long time, I believed that being a committed founder meant giving everything I had to the business. I poured so much of myself into building that, somewhere along the way, I stopped pouring enough back into myself. Eventually, I realized something that changed the way I thought about both work and life: I could only show up for the things I cared about as well as I was showing up for myself.

I started becoming more intentional about the things that filled me back up. Sometimes that was exercise or acupuncture. Sometimes it was therapy, meditation, journaling, or simply creating more space to think. And as I began taking better care of myself, I noticed that I wasn't becoming less ambitious. I was becoming more creative, more energized, and better at what I did.

That lesson stayed with me and it ultimately became part of the idea behind Soulstice.

The name is inspired by the summer solstice, when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, but with "soul" intentionally at its center. It's a reminder that reaching our own highest potential requires taking care of the person who's trying to get there.

Haircare may seem like a small place to begin that conversation, but I've come to think differently about the time we spend caring for ourselves. The shower is one of the increasingly rare places where many of us aren't looking at a phone, answering an email, sitting in a meeting, or doing something for someone else. For a few minutes, we're simply taking care of ourselves. And I wanted Soulstice to make those minutes feel a little more meaningful.

To turn something we often think of as another task on the list, "I have to wash my hair," into something we might actually look forward to. Not an elaborate wellness ritual. Just a small, everyday opportunity to slow down, care for yourself, and refill your cup.

After more than a decade working in haircare, I had a much deeper understanding of what I wanted to formulate differently this time. I kept coming back to the idea of foundational hair health. So much of haircare focuses on the immediate result: more shine, less frizz, smoother hair. Those things matter, but I wanted to go deeper and think about what hair and scalp need as the foundation for looking and feeling healthy over time.

That led us to two ideas that sit at the heart of Soulstice: nourishment and hydration. I worked alongside a chemist to create our patent-pending VitaMega™ Complex, a proprietary blend of Kakadu Plum, Sacha Inchi, and Inositol designed to help nourish the scalp and hair. It was the first time I'd ever worked on a patent, and the process pushed me deeper into the science of haircare than I'd ever gone before.

Hydration became the other through line. Over the years, I noticed how many of the things people struggle with, including dryness, frizz, damage, breakage, and lack of manageability, often share a relationship with moisture. So every Soulstice formula begins there.

I also wanted to challenge another assumption I've seen throughout my career: that an elevated beauty experience has to come with an elevated price. Beautiful formulas are expensive to make. But I've also learned where costs can accumulate without meaningfully improving the product. We made very deliberate choices about what to invest in and what to leave out, from unnecessary secondary packaging to ingredients that sound impressive in marketing but don't meaningfully improve performance.

So my goal was simple: create formulas and a brand experience that feel truly premium, and make them accessible to more people. We're launching with a deliberately edited collection. I have notebooks full of ideas for what comes next, but I didn't want to begin by asking you to navigate dozens of products. I wanted to start with the essentials, the products I would want with me if I could only choose a handful.

And yes, I already have a favorite. Buttersilk™ Restorative Mask has been sitting within arm's reach of me for months. I love hair masks, and I worked on this one for a very long time. The name came from the simplest description I could think of for how I wanted hair to feel after using it: buttery soft and silky.

More than anything, though, I hope Soulstice becomes bigger than any individual product. I hope it becomes a brand that brings a little more joy into the everyday act of caring for your hair.

Building this company for the second time around has felt very different. I have more experience now, certainly, but what has surprised me most is how much more joy I've found in the process. There's a calmer confidence that comes from having done hard things before. It has given me more room to imagine, create, collaborate with an incredible team, and really enjoy the privilege of building something from nothing again.

And I don't take that privilege lightly. There's a version of life where, after building and selling a company, you're supposed to decide you've done enough. But I've realized that creating is simply part of who I am. I love the work, developing products, building teams and solving problems, and obsessing over details most people will never know I obsessed over.

I feel incredibly grateful that I get to do it again, this time with everything I've learned and a much clearer understanding of the kind of founder, company, and life I want to build.

Soulstice is the result of that next chapter.

Thank you for being here at the beginning.

With love,
Nancy
Founder, Soulstice