Courtney Adeleye has been told everything she touches turns to gold, and she has the portfolio to back it up. Through innovation, determination, and a little experimentation, she went from nursing science graduate to one of the most successful business leaders in beauty and wellness.
She broke into the beauty industry in 2013 with her award-winning brand, The Mane Choice, changing the game for what’s possible for Black women founders in beauty. Starting with just $500, a YouTube channel, and a dream, she scaled the business into a $100 million company.
After the brand’s acquisition by MAV Beauty Brands in 2019, she took a hiatus from the hair care industry. Now she’s back in the industry that made it all possible. Her latest venture, the marine-inspired hair care line Watch & Sea, is a testament to her evolution as an entrepreneur and is already on the shelves of major retailers like Walmart, Target, and CVS.
BAUCE spoke with Courtney about her journey from humble beginnings to multi-million-dollar success, and her excitement to be back in the hair care game.
From curiosity to a $100 million company
Courtney didn’t set out to build a brand that would one day sit on the shelves of dozens of retailers across the country. A common problem — and her own curiosity — put her on the path to entrepreneurship instead.
With a background in nursing, she’d always had a solution-oriented mindset. So when she started her natural hair journey, it was only a matter of time before she began experimenting with ingredients around her home to tame her curls and keep her hair healthy.
In 2013, she started documenting the process on YouTube and quickly built a following across social media. The demand for the homemade formulas she was crafting in her kitchen became something she couldn’t ignore. What started as a hobby became a business that expanded from zero distribution to more than 60,000 retail doors in less than 24 months.
Making the product was the easy part. As a new business owner, Courtney quickly learned she needed a different set of skills to keep the business running. She describes having to take on the mindset of a CEO, CFO, and COO all at once, learning the ins and outs of business as she went.
Her advice to founders chasing a similar leap: don’t lead with passion alone. “Always lead with not just what you are passionate about, but what you are good at,” she says. “You want to align it with something that you can become good at, and you do that by practicing your craft.”
Over six years, those hard-won lessons paid off, turning her homegrown side hustle into a nationally recognized brand.
Why she decided to sell
Selling was never the plan — at least not at first. Courtney sought an evaluation because she wanted to know if she was running the business right, not necessarily find an exit. “I was really trying to see, am I even doing this the right way? Am I pricing right?” she says. It didn’t take long for people in the industry to read it differently. “They’re like, oh, she’s ready to sell… but I really was not.”
But when the acquisition offer came in 2019, Courtney felt the timing was right. She treasured the accolades and the loyal community The Mane Choice had built, but from a business standpoint, she didn’t want to get boxed into a corner she couldn’t get out of.
“We could say, ‘Oh my God, you know, we see this hair care brand, and they’ve been Black-owned for X amount of years, but the valuation is almost nothing.’ They’ve passed their maturity date,” she explains.
Ownership also played a role. She’d watched other founders take on so many investors that they no longer held full control of their own companies.
She knew the sale wouldn’t just be a business transaction to her community. For Black women, she says, it would feel personal. So the backlash didn’t surprise her.
“I think it’s one of the most personal businesses you can have. When it comes to us as Black women, that’s something that’s always been prevalent in our community — like we used to go to beauty shops, our mom would do our hair on the weekend. It’s much more than just business, so I’m aware of that. When people were disappointed, I never took it personally.”
Regardless of how it played out, Courtney’s advice to founders is straightforward: always build your business to be sellable, so it becomes a real asset down the road. “Not that you need to sell,” she says, “but you’ll know that now you have a business — even if you wanted to — that you can pass down as a legacy brand for generations to come.”
Coming back home
After selling The Mane Choice, Courtney turned her attention elsewhere. With years of entrepreneurial experience under her belt, she wanted to test whether the same principles that built her first company could work in other industries. They did. Branching out from beauty into wellness, she went on to develop several more multi-million-dollar brands.
Still, of everything she’s built, hair care was the one venture that never felt like work. “I feel as if it just came naturally. I’m talking to my sisters, I’m talking to my friends,” she says. That’s what pulled her back to the industry she loves most.
Now, as founder and CEO of Watch & Sea Beauty, Courtney is making waves in hair care once again — this time with science-backed formulations inspired by the ocean, designed to rejuvenate and replenish natural, textured hair.
Never one to follow trends, Courtney wanted to build something unseen in the category. After extensive research, she landed on an untapped opportunity: aquatic, marine-derived ingredients. Seaweed, sea kelp, and algae now anchor her formulas, each one serving a specific purpose.
“I fell in love with these ingredients because they have bioavailable minerals — they penetrate the hair more efficiently and more quickly, and people can feel those results a lot quicker,” Courtney explains. “And then, you know, people thought that maybe she couldn’t do it again — so we just told them to watch and see.”
A different kind of challenge
Courtney comes back to the industry with far more knowledge than she had the first time around, but the comeback has come with its own set of challenges. With Watch & Sea already stocked in major retailers like Walmart, Target, and CVS, the expectations are higher than ever — and the “grow as you go” approach that carried The Mane Choice in its early days simply isn’t an option this time.
“I didn’t have to meet the expectations of a retailer. I didn’t have to ship this product on time. I didn’t have to have 50,000 or 100,000 units on standby,” Courtney explains. “Now you don’t have time to grow as you go — you need a million dollars’ worth of inventory today. You’re just trading one problem for the next, and that’s business as a whole.”
Courtney is candid about how much work it takes to run a brand. No matter how far along you get, she says, it never gets easier — it just changes. Her advice to any aspiring founder: be prepared to put in the work.
“You’re not doing it because it’s easy. You’re doing it because, hopefully, you’re trying to make some type of difference.”
Courtney doesn’t take her return to mass retail lightly. With Watch & Sea now sitting alongside The Mane Choice on shelves at Walmart, Target, and CVS, she’s become the first Black woman to have two separate brands stocked at that scale. She’s excited to be back and, more importantly, excited to serve the community she values the most.
“There are brands out there that are centered around the person who started them, but for me, it’s always centered around my consumer.”
