‘Redundancy was the kick I needed to found Tootilab curly haircare’

Redundancy on her first day back at work jolted Gaia Tonanzi out of her honeymoon haze, pushing her into founding her own business, which saw revenues of more than £500,000 in its first year.

After a month-long adventure trekking the Inca trail in Peru and relaxing on the Galapagos Islands with her husband, Davide, Tonanzi returned from her honeymoon to find a meeting with her employer in her diary. She knew something was wrong. They were letting her go.

“I came back to reality and it was a strong comeback to reality,” Tonanzi said.

Less than a month after losing her job, she was registering Tootilab, a curly haircare brand, with her co-founder and friend, Julio Quintana, over a glass of wine at the kitchen table.

She is philosophical about her unexpected redundancy, and also the chance it gave her to test out her abilities as an entrepreneur. “It felt like a sign from the universe. You don’t have the safety net any more. You can go around for other jobs, spend a few months sending CVs, or just do it, just try it. We don’t have kids, we’re renting, we don’t have a mortgage, we have literally no commitments.”

Tonanzi, 31, wasn’t a stranger to the haircare industry. In 2019 she became the first member of staff at Curlsmith, a curly-hair-focused UK start-up. She spent three years in the company working on marketing, and left just one week before Curlsmith was sold for over £118 million in 2022 to Helen of Troy, an American consumer products group.

Working at Curlsmith made her consider starting her own company, one which sold products she would be more interested in buying as someone with curly hair. But she didn’t feel ready at the time.

“I was too young. I didn’t have the experience. I’ve never worked for a big-brand corporation. I didn’t know how things worked. I felt I needed to build my experience a bit more before doing something like that. I was expecting a bigger company to be a lot more structured and organised than a start-up and I saw that it’s not necessarily the case,” Tonanzi said.

Tonanzi and Quintana, 37, spent 18 months researching and refining the product before launching Tootilab officially in May 2024. It started with a curl cream and a gel, but has since introduced a shampoo and conditioner.

The duo decided to offer only a few products to make it easier for people who had never looked after their curly hair before. They also opted to use packaging with gender-neutral colours, as they felt curly hair products are often targeted at women.

“There was an appetite for people to have something simpler because most of the brands out there have a lot of products, sometimes they have odd names, you’re not sure what they’re supposed to do for you, and it’s hard to navigate,” Tonanzi said.

The products are manufactured in the UK, but shipped worldwide, with Tootilab now using warehouses in the UK, Europe and the United States. The products aren’t cheap compared with standard supermarket haircare, with a 400ml bottle of shampoo costing £32, but Tonanzi said 50 per cent of customers return to Tootilab.

Tonanzi said her goals for the company moving forward were to get the product in retail and to start targeting hairdressers to stock Tootilab.

Looking back on her experience, Tonanzi said it still served as motivation. “I’m pretty stubborn. To be told by someone, ‘you’re not good enough’, it’s a catalyst. It is like, ‘you think so? I’m gonna prove you wrong.’ It pushes me to do better. It was the kick that I needed, but also the motivation that keeps pushing.”