The handmade hair-tie hustle that was destined to land on tens of thousands of retail shelves
When founders ask what really separates the brands that break out from the ones that burn out, the answer usually sounds tactical, whether that be distribution, margins, timing, or even luck.
But if you look at the journey of Cassandra Thurswell, founder of beauty and haircare brand Kitsch, the story starts somewhere much quieter – alone in a Los Angeles apartment, making hair ties by hand and practicing something most business plans never mention.
Start small (but don’t think small)
In 2010, Thurswell was 25 years old, newly arrived from Wisconsin, and using her life savings to launch a simple product. She wasn’t raising venture capital. She wasn’t hiring a team. She was crafting each hair tie herself and selling directly to boutiques and salons, while putting her revenue straight back into the business.
That constraint might not have been glamorous, but it was incredibly formative.
By bootstrapping from day one, Thurswell kept ownership and control. No board. No outside pressure to grow at all costs. Just product, customers, and steady reinvestment. And those early challenges – limited cash, uncertain demand, the grind of proving product-market fit – forced a discipline that many founders only learn later.
Eventually, Kitsch grew into a broader hair and beauty brand, moving into scrunchies, clips, and satin sleep accessories.
The product line then evolved into a cohesive “shower-to-sleep” routine, including sustainable shampoo bars and heatless styling tools. But the expansion wasn’t random. It was adjacent, brand-consistent, and customer-led.
Thurswell’s sense of clarity and control helped Kitsch scale to more than $300 million in annual sales and placement in over 27,000 stores worldwide – all while remaining bootstrapped. These tactics alone, however, don’t necessarily explain the resilience required to get there.
Mental rehearsal
In an interview with the “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players” podcast, Thurswell said that she was practicing visualization long before Kitsch appeared in national retailers. As a middle school basketball player, she learned that athletes improved their free-throw accuracy by imagining successful shots, and it was a lesson that stuck.
So, years later, while assembling hair ties in her apartment, she would put on headphones, close her eyes, and vividly imagine the life and company she wanted to build. Not as fantasy, but as a way to rehearse the life she wanted.
She describes pausing multiple times a day to “micro-manifest,” which is a structured mental reset that keeps her future vision top of mind.
For founders, the takeaway isn’t necessarily mystical. It’s neurological. What you repeatedly picture, you begin to normalize. What feels normal becomes less intimidating, and what’s less intimidating becomes actionable.
Thurswell also pairs her visualization techniques with something she calls “future journaling”. In 2018, she wrote a journal entry as if Kitsch had already launched into Target and achieved major national success. It was written in the past tense, with a reflection of sales soaring, shelves stocked, and the milestone achieved.
In 2024, that vision materialized with Kitsch’s launch into Target – a defining retail expansion that validated the brand’s scale and appeal – as well as other major retailers at the time.
Normalizing success before it arrives
The journaling might not have caused the retail deals, but the work, strategy, and product as a result did. And the practice shaped how she made decisions long before the opportunity appeared.
At the end of the day, practicing daily mental clarity can influence how a founder approaches long-term decisions. Getting used to the idea of big outcomes may reduce the instinct to retreat when success gets close, and building independently can create space to choose partners and timing more deliberately.
Kitsch’s trajectory shows that alignment matters – between product and customer, between distribution and brand, between ambition and execution. But it also shows that the founder’s internal world shapes the external one more than most spreadsheets capture.
Because sometimes the difference between a side hustle and a brand worth hundreds of millions is not just strategy – it’s the discipline to see it before anyone else does.
