This YouTube Mom is Building Walmart’s Fastest-Growing Haircare Brand

A conversation with Hairitage founder, Mindy McKnight.

One of my favorite parts of co-running The Beauty Brief is realizing just how small the beauty industry really is.

A brand lands in my inbox; I look up the founder, and suddenly I'm thinking, "Wait..."I know this name.

Just in this case, I wasn’t the fan. My little sister was! 

Growing up, she watched Brooklyn and Bailey, two twins on YouTube, as well as their mother, who also had a channel called Cute Girls Hairstyles. 

Side note: I also vividly remember one of the Twins’ videos teaching me how to put in contact lenses (which, to be fair, was life-changing at the time).

I obviously never imagined that years later I'd be interviewing their mom about building one of Walmart's fastest-growing haircare brands called Hairitage.

It's funny how life (and the internet) works.

Before creator-founded beauty brands became the norm, Mindy McKnight had already spent years building trust online. She started posting hairstyle tutorials back in 2008, mostly for other moms looking for easy ways to do their daughters' hair. That eventually turned into one of YouTube's biggest family channels, with more than 2 billion views worldwide.

What I found most intriguing wasn't that she eventually launched a haircare brand…it almost feels inevitable in hindsight. It was how she went about it.

"I wasn't interested in just putting my name on something," she told me. "I wanted to create solutions that actually worked for different hair types and textures."

And I feel like that's the difference between creators who launch brands just because it feels like the next passive income business move and those who genuinely spend years earning credibility in a category before they ever think about making a product.

I mean, Mindy has spent nearly two decades talking about hair, testing products, answering questions online, and teaching people how to style every texture imaginable through a screen.

Another thing that really stood out to me (and something that makes a lot sense for her audience) is that she never wanted Hairitage to become a luxury beauty brand.

"Making Hairitage accessible was never a business strategy. It was a personal priority," she shared with me. "Beauty shouldn't feel out of reach."

That philosophy is probably why the brand has found so much success at Walmart instead of chasing prestige distribution at other retailers I’ll leave unnamed here.

Hairitage’s newest collection feels like an extension of that same thinking. Instead of adding more complexity, the line keeps things intentionally simple: formulas made with 12 ingredients or fewer, hypoallergenic fragrances, and targeted systems for hydration, strengthening, volume, and frizz control.

"I wish people would stop overcomplicating the fundamentals," Mindy shared. 

As someone who spends way too much time watching beauty trends come and go (an occupational hazard), I couldn't agree more.

We spend so much time in this industry talking about what makes a brand successful – unique packaging, patented ingredients, retailer expansion…the list goes on. 

But conversations like this are a good reminder that trust is still one of the hardest things to build and one of the easiest things to underestimate.

Hairitage may be growing quickly, but its roots (pun intended) weren’t built overnight. It started years earlier with a camera, a hairbrush, and someone consistently showing up to help people.