One of hairstylist Adey Heyman’s clients nicknamed her “the frontal queen” in a nod to her skills installing lace front wigs.
In 2020, she leveraged her wig knowledge to launch a lace melting spray now called It’s Giving Laid And Slayed, which has become the hero product of her brand unsurprisingly named The Frontal Queen. “If you wear wigs, you’re most likely using a glue to install it, and sometimes glues can be messy and hard to take off from your hairline and sometimes it can actually damage your hairline,” says Heyman. “So, I wanted to develop a product that could function as a glue, but doesn’t necessarily have all the chemical properties of a glue to make it a consistency of a glue.”
In 2021, she turned The Frontal Queen’s branding up a notch by hiring Willow & Blake, the agency whose founders Erika Geraerts, Bree Johnson and Jessica Hatzis created Frank Body along with Alexander Boffa and Steve Rowley, to amplify its identity and voice. The Frontal Queen also expanded its collection with seven products to complement It’s Giving Laid And Slayed: Baby Hair Control, Smooth Moves Flat Iron Spray, Supreme Sculpting Crème, No-Drama Detangling Spray, Foaming Curl Control, No-Fuss Curl Detangler and Hair on Sleek Wax Stick. The products are all priced at $25 or less.
“The wig industry and Black hair industry in general is pretty monotonous,” says Heyman. “Everyone looks the same or sounds the same or has the same brand colors. I really wanted to differentiate myself and stand out in a bold way both visually and I guess audibly because our brand personality is very cheeky, raw, bold and unapologetic.”
The Frontal Queen’s bold look and personality have been popular on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The brand has 255,000 followers on the former and 166,400 on the latter, where it’s racked up 3.5 million likes. Heyman plans on experimenting with YouTube Shorts and Pinterest eventually, but Instagram and TikTok are where The Front Queen is focused at present.
“A lot of videos that go viral are videos where people learn something. I’m the kind of person where I don’t gatekeep, and I’ve always been this way,” says Heyman. “I know now we’re living in an era where everyone is sharing everything, but, prior to this, I always shared tips in videos on Instagram, and I think people appreciate learning something that they don’t know and they don’t have to pay for.”
In 2021, Heyman enlarged The Frontal Queen’s team with four staff members in marketing, three staff members in advertising and another three in web development. “It’s definitely a game changer, not having to write and design emails yourself or create social media posts yourself,” she says. “Because as a founder-slash-hairstylist, there are so many hats that I wear already that something like marketing should be handed off to the professionals and not handled by me.”
The Frontal Queen recently brought on a third-party logistics company. Heyman hopes getting the brand’s logistics in order will be a stepping stone to it pinning down retail partnerships. She’s in talks with Urban Outfitters to carry the brand, and identifies Sally Beauty, Ulta Beauty, Target, Walmart and Sephora as dream retailers for it.
“The wig industry and Black hair industry in general is pretty monotonous. I really wanted to differentiate myself and stand out in a bold way.”
Heyman has pretty much been styling hair her entire life. “I grew up in Nigeria, and it’s not uncommon for little girls to know how to do hair and, moving to the U.S, I did hair for fun for my friends and family members,” she says. She went to school for psychology, but felt compelled to return to doing hair. Heyman says, “I realized that hair was meant for me when it didn’t feel like work when I was doing it. I just decided to keep going in that direction of following my passion and following what makes me happy.”
Hairstyling makes her happy, but it’s not always great for her body. She saw as many as eight to nine clients a day in the job, and the strain from the hefty schedule caused her to have back problems. To reduce the strain on her back and supplement her income, she started selling wigs and hair extensions before pivoting to haircare products. “I really wanted to shift the way I was attributing my energy,” she says. “I decided I wanted to work smarter, not harder.”
Heyman still works as a hairstylist in a salon she owns and designed in downtown Los Angeles. Clients can book appointments on The Frontal Queen’s website with her or other hairstylists. However, to relieve the stress on her body and devote time to the brand, she’s cut down her daily load of clients to one or two from eight to nine. Still, she prioritizes keeping hairstyling clients to inform The Frontal Queen’s product development.
Heyman says, “I definitely look at pain points and, as a stylist, I have access to seeing what frustrates customers from a wig install standpoint.”
At the moment, she’s spotting difficulties matching the lace attached to wigs to clients’ skin. She’s in the process of creating a lace tinting line in response. “I just look for issues and problems that people have and try to fix them,” says Heyman. “And that was the starting point for me going the product route and trying to solve problems that currently exist in the wig industry without having to work 12 hours a day.”
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