A stylist working on a client in a salon chair

Since 2013

Our Story

Mayvenn was built in a salon chair, not a boardroom. For over a decade, stylists, creators and customers have made this brand what it is — and they are the reason we are still here.

It started with a stylist

A hairstylist in Los Angeles called her brother with a problem. She was spending hours sourcing hair for her clients, paying too much for it, and never quite knowing what she would get when the box arrived.

Her brother, Diishan Imira, had spent years working with manufacturers overseas. So he found better hair, at a better price, and started delivering it out of the trunk of his car. He and co-founder Taylor Wang put $48,000 of their own and their families’ money behind it.

That was 2013. The company was named Mayvenn — for the maven, the person everybody asks first — and it was founded on a simple idea the hair industry had somehow missed: the stylist already knows best. She is the one your client trusts. She should be the one who profits when that trust turns into a purchase.

So Mayvenn built the business around her. Free storefronts for stylists. Commission on every sale. No inventory to buy, no minimums, no risk. Within eighteen months, 30,000 stylists had signed on.

Silicon Valley noticed. Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A in 2015, with Serena Williams and Jimmy Iovine investing alongside. Essence Ventures led the round that followed. Investors put $76 million behind the belief that a Black-founded, stylist-first hair brand could change how this industry works.

A Mayvenn customer wearing caramel brown deep wave hair, styled by her stylist — Styled by @letpree — Caramel Brown Deep Wave

Built by the chair, the camera and the customer

We have never been under any illusion about who built Mayvenn.

50,000+
The stylists
More than 50,000 hair professionals have partnered with Mayvenn — recommending our bundles, installing them, and putting their own reputation on the line every time they did. We paid out over $35 million in commission to those stylists, and it is the number we are proudest of.
5.5M views
The creators
The install videos. The 30-second reels. The “where did you get that hair?” comment threads. Creators taught more people how to wear, wash, style and reuse extensions than any ad campaign we ever ran — most of it filmed at home with a ring light.
10 years
The customers
Bundles for a wedding. A first wig after a big change. The reorder that came in like clockwork every eight weeks for six years. Thousands of five-star reviews, written by people who had no reason to write anything at all.

Thank you. That is the whole company right there.

A decade of Mayvenn

Thirteen years, nine turning points. Scroll or use the arrows.

2013
The trunk of a car
Mayvenn launches in Oakland, California with $48,000 from friends and family, sourcing hair for one stylist who needed better than what she could find.
2015
30,000 stylists
The stylist network passes 30,000 in under two years. Andreessen Horowitz leads a $10 million Series A; Serena Williams, Jimmy Iovine and Steve Stoute invest.
2017
The Mayvenn Made era
Customers and stylists start posting their own installs, and #MayvennMade becomes the brand’s biggest source of new customers — earned, not bought.
2018
Free installs
Buy three bundles, get your install free with a certified stylist in your city, paid for by Mayvenn. Essence Ventures leads a $23 million round to build it out.
2019
The Airbnb of salons
Forbes profiles the company. Cumulative sales pass $80 million and the network crosses 50,000 stylists across 250 cities.
2020
Into the aisle
Mayvenn Beauty Lounge opens inside Walmart — counters where customers could see the hair in person and book a certified stylist on the spot.
2022
Recognized
Glossy names Mayvenn’s founder to the Glossy 50 as a Changemaker. Commission paid out to stylists passes $35 million.
2024
Best Hair Extensions
Marie Claire’s Skin & Hair Awards name Mayvenn the winner in Best Hair Extensions — judged from a shortlist of more than 600 brands by the magazine’s beauty team alongside dermatologists, trichologists and working hairstylists.
2026
The Second Act
A summer to regroup, and a brand rebuilt from the ground up.

The standard has not moved

One rule has held since the trunk of that car: if a stylist would not put it in her own client’s head, we do not sell it.

Every Mayvenn bundle, closure, frontal and wig is 100% virgin human hair — cuticles intact, aligned in one direction, never mixed with synthetic filler. It takes color. It holds a curl. It lasts through the reinstall, and the one after that. That is the entire reason a $56 bundle from a brand most beauty editors had never heard of beat 600 others for Best Hair Extensions.

Close-up of deep wave virgin human hair hand-tied into a transparent lace closure — Deep wave on a transparent 2×6 lace closure — cuticles intact, hand-tied.

Marie Claire award winner — Best Hair Extensions
100% virgin human hair, never blended
30-day guarantee
Trusted by 50,000+ stylists since 2013

Now

Mayvenn’s Second Act

This summer, we did something most brands never do. We stopped.

Not because the work was finished, but because it was not. After more than a decade, we took the season to pull the whole thing apart — the catalog, the site, the sourcing, the way we talk about hair — and put it back together the way it should have been all along.

The hair you already love, unchanged
The bundles, closures, frontals and wigs that built ten years of five-star reviews are still here, still 100% virgin human hair, still made to the same standard. We did not reinvent what was already working.
New textures, new formats, new options
Raw hair. HD lace. Human braiding hair and crochet. Lengths, lace sizes and cap constructions our customers have been asking us for. The catalog is growing every week, and it is being built from what you actually search for — not from what was easy to stock.
And the stylists come back
The professionals who built this brand are being invited back in, with a program built to be worth their time.

There are more Mayvenn products in development that we are not ready to talk about yet — when they are right, you will be the first to know. Ten years in, we know exactly what Mayvenn is for. Second Act is us finally building it properly.

Marie Claire Skin & Hair Awards 2024Winner — Best Hair ExtensionsJudged from a shortlist of more than 600 brands

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