T is for Tame: kids' hair care products at $90K a month

T is for Tame sells natural hair gel, cream, detangler, shampoo, conditioner, wands and kits for babies and young children to parents — its main target being moms with kids aged 0 to 5 before the first haircut — and was doing $90K a month in revenue as the founder reported in a Starter Story interview published in May 2023.

How it started

Founder and CEO Becky Bavli launched the company in January 2018, after her twins were born with hair and she couldn't find clean products to tame it. Every morning the twins woke up with hair standing up, in knots, or all over the place; her husband, she says, started licking his hands to tame it. She came out of advertising, where she had already worked on hair care brands and baby brands.

She started from the problem rather than the product category: a hair product for babies that was safe, not sticky, stiff or oily, and actually worked. She experimented with different fruit juices, oils and other ingredients, and after several formulas landed on coconut oil as a main ingredient. The next step was finding a chemist to develop and test it — not obvious for someone with a marketing background. She stalked chemist websites and LinkedIn and reached out to someone who had worked in the baby industry, because she wanted to own the formula rather than license someone else's.

Before launching she did roughly six months of homework on one channel: she listened to Amazon expert podcasts while her twins slept in the car, and was once pulled over for circling the neighborhood too often. The officer let her go after hearing the podcast and seeing the twins asleep. She launched on Amazon and, in her words, decided "to do one thing well in the beginning and expand after I had truly nailed it."

What it sells and how it charges

According to the official site as fetched on 2026-09-30, the range covers gel, cream, detangler, shampoo, conditioner, wands and kits. Shopping is organized by age (newborns & babies, toddlers & kids), by need (frizz & unruly, flyaways & bedhead, dryness & conditioning, knots & tangles, curly hair, wash & clean, cradle cap, vegan) and by product type. The site's own copy describes the formulas as natural, vegan and cruelty-free, free of harsh ingredients, hypoallergenic and dermatologist tested, and designed for sensitive scalps. A "top trio" of Hair Taming Cream, Taming Gel and Detangling Spray anchors the range; kits include a Taming Starter with two best sellers and a soft bristle brush, and a broader Taming Essentials set.

On price, the site states free shipping on all orders over $39, and runs a "Lil' Luxe Club" membership that moves through Bronze, Silver and Gold tiers, unlocking perks such as free shipping, exclusive discounts and birthday surprises. The fetch returned no pricing page, so individual product prices are not stated here. The site also lists where to shop, including Amazon, Target and Walmart, plus wholesale.

How it got its first customers and what kept growth going

The first version went to moms before it went to market: "We mainly used Facebook mom groups and my local community to have moms try it and fill out anonymous surveys." She has said she needed other moms to buy into it before she could believe it would work, even though she already loved the idea.

Amazon became and remains the number one sales channel, and the founder describes it as the area she studied most and feels most comfortable in. At the time of the interview, roughly 80% of sales ran through Amazon, about 10% through retail, and the rest through e-commerce and wholesale. Retail distribution covers specialty stores, Walmart, Target and natural grocery, with the brand deliberately investing in showing up where its customer already shops, running promotions with retail partners and using ads to drive geo-targeted traffic to stores.

Social came later and slower. The team now puts product into the hands of micro-influencers on Instagram and TikTok in exchange for content, funnels them into an affiliate program, and turns the best-performing content into ads. Word of mouth among moms is the mechanism the brand is built around: people have to experience the product before they will talk about it. The founder also reports a hair gel launch that reached #1 New Product in its category on Amazon, with three more products planned that year, and revenue growth of over 85% each year.

Two constraints show up repeatedly in her account. Inventory is the first: the business ran out several times during the pandemic, and she believes that on any channel other than Amazon it would have killed the company, because missed deliveries would have damaged retail and customer relationships as well as sales. The second is discoverability: launching on Amazon in 2018 and in 2023 are, in her telling, completely different, with the algorithm making keyword ranking harder and ad spend alone no longer buying visibility. Her answer is to drive the existing customer base to discover new products, buy them and tell others.

The numbers

Metric	Figure	Basis
Monthly revenue	$90K	Founder-reported, May 2023 interview
Founders	1	At time of interview
Employees	5	At time of interview
Started	January 2018	Founder
Based in	Nanuet, NY, USA	Founder
Channel split	80% Amazon, 10% retail, remainder e-commerce/wholesale	Founder, at time of interview
Families served	Over 100,000+ worldwide	Founder's words, at time of interview

The revenue figure is what the founder said at that date; it is not current revenue, and the interview gives no starting-cost figure.

How it compares

The benchmarks below come from 1M.chat's analysis of 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews from 2015 to 2026. That is a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses, and the revenue figures are self-reported at each interview's date.

Within the Beauty & personal care category, 55 businesses have founder-reported revenue. The category median monthly revenue is $70K, 44% of the category is at $1M a year or more, median headcount is 3 employees, and 62% were started by one founder. Among the 40 businesses in the category with channel information, the most common growth channels are organic social media (68%), paid ads (40%), launch platforms such as Product Hunt, AppSumo and marketplaces (38%), and SEO and organic search (38%).

Against that backdrop, T is for Tame's reported $90K a month sits above the category median, its team of 5 is above the category median of 3, and it fits the one-founder pattern that covers 62% of the category. The more interesting difference is channel: the most common channel in the category sample is organic social media, while this business concentrated on Amazon first and then on wholesale and big-box retail, and came to micro-influencers later as a way to get content and customer understanding that a marketplace does not provide. Every figure here is founder-reported at a different date, so this is a comparison of self-reported snapshots, not of businesses measured at the same moment.

What a founder can take from it

Test the product with a group you can actually reach. Before spending on launch, put it in the hands of the people you are building for and collect structured feedback — in this case, anonymous surveys through Facebook mom groups and a local community.

Decide early what you need to own. She wanted to own the formula, and that requirement determined how she searched for a chemist and who she was willing to work with.

Study one channel before you commit to it. Six months of listening to Amazon podcasts preceded the launch, and the constraint she understood best became the channel that carried most of the revenue.

Know what your best channel cannot give you. Amazon supported cash flow but did not explain who the customer was or why she bought, and the answer was micro-influencers, gifting and an affiliate program that produce both content and relationships.

Treat inventory as a growth limit, not an operations detail. Running out cost sales and put retail relationships at risk, and she believes a different channel mix would have made it fatal.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure