Influencer’s Indian-inspired hair oil brand made $4 million in sales

Erim Kaur, entrepreneur and influencer, made $4 million in sales after founding a hair-oil brand rooted in ancient Indian traditions.

London-based Kaur has over 700,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok combined, and founded ByErim in 2019 — a luxury haircare brand known for its flagship hair growth oil containing eight pure oils, including Amla, Argan, Coconut, and Castor oil. It has raked in £3.3 million ($4.2 million) since its launch, CNBC Make It has verified.

The 30-year-old pinned the popularity of her hair growth oil on having social media savvy and building a core audience of young Indian women and men turning to her for beauty and life advice.

“I think one of the strongest messages I’ve always had has been that I want to do it for girls or boys that have grown up without a mum and sisters,” Kaur told CNBC Make It in an interview about the popularity of her content.

Kaur was only eight when her mother died of breast cancer, and a memory she always cherished was her mother’s long hair, which she said was a defining part of her identity.

“I really wanted to emulate the way that my mother looked,” she said. “It was scary to see her lose the identifying part of what people saw as something that contributes so heavily to her beauty.”

Kaur recalled that her father, who was only 29 at the time, took her to the barber’s for a haircut. “I didn’t even know how to tie my hair. She died before she taught me,” Kaur said.

That was when she decided to turn to her paternal grandmother, who would apply different oils and ingredients on her hair through her early teens, before landing on a formula that Kaur continued to use as an adult and is the current formulation of the ByErim oil.

Those experiences formed the foundations of Kaur’s social media journey, where she shared her story of growing up without a mum, as well as how she learnt to take care of herself as a woman.  

“I wanted to create a shortcut for any girls or boys that had grown up without a mum, which is why I started to speak about that experience on my page,” she explained.

After gaining 100,000 followers in 2019, she decided to monetize her social media and build ByErim as a homage to both her mother and grandmother while also capitalizing on a growing social media trend.

Hair oiling is an Indian tradition recorded in ancient Sanskrit medicinal texts like Charaka Samhita, and passed on through the centuries. Indian women are taught by their mothers and grandmothers to massage oils into their hair from a young age.

With the influx of Indian immigrants to the U.S. and Europe since the 20^th century, hair-oiling has transcended India’s borders.

Cosmopolitan U.K.’s deputy beauty editor Hanna Ibraheem recently wrote that having her hair oiled as a child resurfaced memories of shame about her identity.

“I’d noticed my peers would get teased for their oiled hair on the school playground. Sure, the oil made my hair soft and strong. I know it’s the reason I have healthy hair today. But at the time, I found the whole thing … well, embarrassing,” Ibraheem said in a piece for the magazine.

Once a marker of shame for many children of South Asian immigrants, hair oiling has filtered into beauty trends on social media.

The hashtag #hairoil has almost half a million posts on TikTok, with mainstream influencers sharing their oiling routines, including what hair oils they use and application techniques.

Tips on hair oiling have made the pages of Vogue in recent years, and a range of brands have surfaced alongside Kaur’s ByErim, including Nikita Charuza’s Ayurveda-inspired Squigs Beauty, Akash and Nikita Mehta’s Fable & Mane, and Kuldeep Knox’s Chāmpo.

“How funny is it that ‘to oil’ never used to be a verb that was in everyone’s daily communication but then this morning I was going to my grandparent’s and I was going to say ‘can you oil my hair for me?’ Back in the day, it would have been people from England saying ‘would you mind putting oil into my hair, or would you mind applying oil to my scalp?’ But it’s now a verb,” Kaur said.

Unlike traditional Indian oiling, which includes the use of greasy, thick oils with a pungent odor, the appeal of brands like ByErim is that it’s fragranced and lightweight, Kaur said.

“I have it in my hair right now. Could you ever tell? I could go to Tesco. I could go to the gym. I could go for dinner with my hair like this,” she said.

Kaur says ByErim’s success isn’t just about the rising popularity of hair oiling but because her followers are “emotionally invested” in her brand.

“Influencers cast a very wide net, but the problem is when you’re trying to reach people who don’t already follow you, you’re alienating the people that do. So, I was very focused on my followers. They’re focused on me,” Kaur said.

Influencer-founded brands have increased in recent years, but not all are cut out for success. Famous influencer brands range from TikTok darling Addison Rae’s makeup line Item Beauty to Instagrammer Arielle Charnas’ clothing brand, Something Navy.

However, Rae’s Item Beauty was discontinued by Sephora in 2023, with Rae failing to promote the brand consistently. Meanwhile, Something Navy faced financial troubles and stopped selling clothes through its website.

“People can sniff out authenticity, and they can sniff out fake very quickly,” Kaur explained. “If your followers really genuinely love you and would support you, they don’t want to feel like they’ve been palmed off with a quick, cheap product that just has your name on it.”

She sets herself apart by sharing the highs and lows of building ByErim on social media, from posting about factories accepting her orders to packaging ByErim bottles by hand.

“So by the time I launched it, people were buying regardless because they wanted to be part of that journey,” she said.

The company, which sold 250 units in its first four hours of launching and another 500 units in January 2020, has played a part in keeping the hair-oiling trend alive.

“I can’t take full credit for anything,” Kaur said of the normalization of hair-oiling. “I think there are some amazing brands out there that are pushing the needle when it comes to sharing what was a secret of our grandma’s kitchen to the masses, but I would like to hope that ByErim has played even a 1% part of that.”