"When we first started to approach retailers in the early '90s, they didn't understand what we were doing," Sundial CEO Richelieu Dennis told BuzzFeed Life. "Customers were demanding it, but retailers weren't connected enough to their consumers to understand that need."

What changed? The emergence of the internet and interest-based forums, which allowed space for loosely configured groups like the burgeoning natural hair community to share resources about healthy haircare and build collective power.

"As that has happened, retailers have woken up and said, 'Hey, now is the time to go out and understand who we are not serving and serve them,'" Dennis said. "The shift in the mindset of retailers and in the accessibility of [products like ours] to consumers has resulted in a seismic shift in the demographics that now drive the current marketplace — and all of those shifts have led to a seismic shift in the beauty landscape overall."