About Us
Made for the Culture, With Love!
Alder Naturals, LLC hair care products was established using homemade hair formulas tested on family members to promote healthy growth, protect, moisturize and repair damaged hair. Hair styling and hair care has been an area of interest in my family stemming back at least three generations. My great aunt, Alder (for which is my middle namesake), was a licensed, 9th Ward New Orleanian beautician in the late 1920s to 1970s. Aunt Alder, who didn't have children of her own, mentored, trained and shared her homemade tonics for hair health with my mother. At age 15, my mother served as her apprentice at Aunt Alder's home-based salon. Her homemade hair tonics and hair styling methods would promote hair growth.
When I was born, my mother gave me the middle name Alder, after her favorite paternal aunt. My mother had been styling hair as a side hustle before I was born. As a child, I learned by watching my mother style her clients' hair and properly care for their textured hair as she did with Aunt Alder.
When my mother retired from her day job, she began taking on more and more clients. My mother's clientele grew through word-of-mouth. Her clients were her walking billboards to seek Brenda's hair styling services for adults and children. She was able to revitalize severely broken and damaged hair back to health with her selected products and homemade hair products. My mom used certain products with ingredients that she knew had properties that would repair dry, flaky scalps and damaged hair. She created formulations to help treat scalp conditions I experienced as a young girl.
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I began making products of my own when my husband and I moved to a suburban community a hour and fifteen minutes outside of Philadelphia, where people of color were few. Hair products for textured hair were not readily available to maintain my hair properly. When our daughters were born, I was faced with not having immediate access to hair products for our hair type. When I was in Philadelphia, I would bulk buy hair products at local beauty supply store for my girls. Sometimes, the products I used were not available at some of the beauty supply stores. This prompted me to began researching and formulating my own hair care products for my daughters and me. I continued to make and use my own products when we relocated closer to the city, but I enjoyed experimenting with different ingredients and to determine what works for our hair and what doesn't. I found myself resulting to some of my mother's hair tonics and techniques to maintain the health of our hair.
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In summer 2021, I shared one of my formulations with my niece during a visit. She encouraged me to start a hair care business using the hair care skills acquired through family traditions. She encouraged me to sell my products to other women and men of color with textured hair. As I began establishing Alder Naturals, LLC, I began researching ingredients to formulate and improve upon my family's hair tonics designated for textured hair to help promote hair growth, hair health, shine, and decrease dryness.
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