It was the early 1980s and America was in the depths of a major economic recession. But for brothers James and Sherman Willis — the co-owners of Willis Beauty Supply, a Black-cosmetics distribution company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio — business was booming.
Much of their success came down to the sale of a single product: the Pro-Line Curly Kit, also known as the at-home Jheri curl.
The brainchild of Los Angeles beauty entrepreneur Comer Cottrell and his brother Jim, the Curly Kit’s do-it-yourself box formula brought shiny, wet-look curls to the masses. Suddenly, a style that had cost upwards of $300 at the salon was achievable in customers’ own homes for $8.
It wasn’t long before the Jheri curl was everywhere, purchased from the Cottrells by distributors like Willis Beauty Supply and sold to retailers across the country. It graced heads from church picnics to bank-teller queues, crowning pop stars like Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie and pro-athletes like Walter Payton and A.C. Green.
“The Curly Kit put everybody on the market,” Sherman Willis, now 80, told me from his home in Columbus.
Willis would likely spot some similarities in today’s beauty-market trends. The U.S. isn’t officially in a recession — though J.P. Morgan Research estimated a 40% chance of one starting before the end of this year — but rising costs and general economic uncertainty are already shifting consumer behavior.
In what has become a reliable recession indicator, salon workers report feeling the squeeze as customers increasingly opt for lower-maintenance coifs that need minimal professional upkeep. Grown-out “recession blonde” tresses have even been declared by some trend-spotters as the style of this summer.
It’s a pattern that calls to mind the “lipstick index,” the time-worn maxim that lipstick sales spike when the economy falters. But the idea applies across cosmetics categories, way beyond a bold red lip.
Time and again, tight budgets have led beauty consumers to forgo pricey professional services for low-cost, user-friendly products and styles. In the early ’80s, the Pro-Line Curly Kit provided a perfect case study for this phenomenon in action — and showed how, with the right product, tough times can create lightning in a bottle for an entire market category.
‘Just bring me some of this Pro-Line Curly Kit’
The Jheri curl was first developed in the late 1970s by Robert “Jheri” Redding, a white hairdresser and businessman who touted his glossy perm creation as an easy wash-and-wear look for the African-American market.
But despite the Jheri curl’s namesake, it was Pro-Line founder Cottrell who quickly became synonymous with the style. Cottrell started the Pro-Line Corporation alongside his brother and another business partner in 1970, mixing hair products by hand and selling them door-to-door. The company sold enough to get by, but the Curly Kit marked its first major success.
Comer Cottrell at a gathering in 1980s New York City. (Anthony Barboza/Getty Images)
Cottrell hired a cosmetic chemist to devise a two-step retail formula that used one solution to soften the hair and another to create a loose and defined curl, allowing users to bypass an expensive and time-consuming trip to the salon.
“We looked at the curl process and saw it really was a simple process, and people could do it themselves,” Cottrell told The Dallas Observer in 1996.
Within a year of hitting store shelves in 1980, the Curly Kit brought the Pro-Line company nearly $10 million in sales, leading Forbes to call it “the biggest single product ever to hit the Black cosmetics market.”
I first heard about Pro-Line’s innovation as a college senior in the fall of 2008, as the Great Recession descended on my cohort’s job prospects like a potentially life-ruining storm. Many of our parents were late-baby boomers who’d weathered similar economic challenges in their 20s, building their careers amid the grizzly “Reagan recession” of the early 1980s.
But my then-boyfriend’s father had a story that stood out. Like Willis, his family owned a Black-cosmetics distribution company that sold Curly Kits “literally by the truckloads” across the country, expanding operations while other industries faltered. The recession had passed him by, and it was all thanks to the Jheri curl.
Willis similarly sold the kits by the truckload. He even drove the trucks himself — demand was so high, there wasn’t time to wait around for a driver. Every three weeks like clockwork, he flew from Columbus to Newark Airport, drove up to his company’s Long Island warehouse, and spent the next few days hauling Curly Kits to SuperX and Kmart stores along the I-95 corridor.
“Every retail store chain that we were servicing said, ‘We don't care when it comes in; we don't care if it's Christmas Day,” Willis recalls. “We'll open up that door. Just bring me some of this Pro-Line Curly Kit that people want.’ It blew the market up.”
The Curly Kit. (Etsy)
The product’s runaway popularity quickly gave rise to a slew of new moisturizing products and curl-activating solutions to help customers maintain their styles, which also sold like hotcakes. For a time, the Willis brothers peddled a white-label curl moisturizer of their own, sliding the product onto the same store shelves as their better-known competitors.
The race to jump in on the frenzy left little time to ponder the finer points of design or branding — Willis laughed when recalling that they decided to name their curl product “Love Curl” — but demand was so high, it barely mattered. Everybody wanted their piece of the pie, and there was plenty to go around.
“It was a booming time,” Willis says. “In my 57 years of being in business, I never had a retail product that made everybody get into the market like Comer’s retail kit.”
Comer Cottrell’s daughter, Renee Cottrell-Brown, agrees that the Curly Kit triggered transformative growth in the Black haircare industry. “A lot of companies grew out of being able to create maintenance products to support that style,” she told me.
But Cottrell-Brown, now 71, isn’t convinced that the market downturn played any special role in that particular product’s success. “To be very candid, hair care is a pretty sustainable market, period,” she says. “Even in a recession.”
Her view harkens to an adage she attributes to her father: “When people feel bad, they want to look good.”
Whatever the case, the Pro-Line Curly Kit made Comer Cottrell a very rich man.
The Hustle
After buying out his business partners to become Pro-Line’s sole proprietor, Cottrell sold the company to Alberto-Culver in 2000 for a reported$75m-$80m. He went on to develop multiple popular hair products, but none matched his breakthrough success. When Cottrell died in 2014 at age 82, it was his hair-curling breakthrough that made the headline of his New York Times obituary.
It was the exact right product for its moment, Willis said. “His timing was perfect.”
The lasting influence of the Jheri curl
Regardless of the recession’s role in the Curly Kit craze, there’s no question that the Jheri curl was about more than market forces.
Kristin Denise Rowe, an American Studies professor at California State University Fullerton and a leading scholar of Black hair and beauty culture, points out that the trajectory of Black hair trends is shaped by the cultural and political currents of each era.
Where the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of natural styles like the Afro, which were tied to the Black Power movement and an ethos of “Black is Beautiful,” the 1980s marked an age of conservative backlash in which Black Americans faced heightened job-market pressures to conform in professional settings. This led to a return to more processed styles — perms, wigs, and straightened hair like Oprah Winfrey's early look. The Jheri curl emerged as a part of this shift.
“I don't think many of us would describe it as ‘natural,’ at least as compared to an Afro,” Rowe says.
Clockwise from the left: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, broadcaster Sunny Joe White, basketball player A.C. Green, and Deion Sanders. (Getty Images)
However, Rowe notes that the Jheri curl occupied a distinct middle ground. Unlike treatments that mimicked white hair textures, the style created its own unabashedly Black aesthetic: processed, but not trying to look straight. It was “uniquely Black in a particular way,” Rowe says.
Like all beauty trends, the Jheri curl’s ubiquity was not to last.
When Michael Jackson sustained second- and third-degree scalp burns from a botched pyrotechnic effect while filming a 1984 Pepsi commercial, many believed the King of Pop’s Jheri curl was to blame.
The style required wearers to apply and reapply drippy glycerin-based curl gels to keep their hair from breaking, a routine with a stubborn penchant for staining shirt-collars and pillowcases.
Above all else, tastes simply moved on. By the end of the 1980s, the Jheri curl was reduced to a punchline.
Its pop-culture afterlife, however, lived on. Rowe and I both remember Jheri curl jokes from our late ’90s elementary-school heydays, more than a decade after the style fell from vogue. Jheri curl references abound on TikTok and Reddit, often exchanged by users born upwards of 10, 20, or even 30 years after the hairstyle’s reign.
Rowe suspects it comes down to a memeable quality in the look itself. “It’s just very distinct,” she says.
The decades since have seen Black-hair trends shift further toward chemical straighteners, then back to more natural and protective hairstyles. But the Curly Kit’s legacy has quietly lived on.
Just For Me was developed by Renee Cottrell-Brown. Nu Standard, which features the product Hydrasilk, was launched by Autumn Yarborough, Cottrell-Brown’s daughter. (Ebony via Instagram, Walmart)
Just For Me, an at-home hair relaxer developed by Cottrell-Brown and also sold by Pro-Line, was a drugstore mainstay throughout the 1990s. Though Cottrell-Brown recently retired, she has passed along the family torch to her daughter, Autumn Yarborough, who launched her own NU Standard beauty brand in 2020.
A lot has changed since the days when the Curly Kit ruled the Black haircare business. The rise of big-box retail corporations such as Walmart, which were big enough to handle their own distribution logistics, all but eliminated middlemen like the Willises from the cosmetics supply chain by the early 2000s. The few such businesses that survived were wiped out by Amazon in the years that followed.
But Cottrell-Brown insists that the beauty business remains ripe with opportunity. “It’s all about your niche and how you go to market,” she said. “There are a lot of me-toos” — copycats —“out there, believe me. But they don't last.”
