Why We’re Building sparrow
There's a conversation that happens in quiet, in between other things. In the haircare aisle of a dm. In the back of an Uber after a friend's party. Over coffee when someone asks: "Where do you even find products here?"
It starts with hope, moves through shared frustration, and ends the same way almost every time — with a half-smile and a reluctant acceptance. You make do.
For a while, that feels practical. Mature, even. You adjust. You substitute. You lower expectations. But over time, making do stops feeling resilient and starts feeling exhausting.
We built sparrow because we got tired of that feeling. And because we had the skills to do something about it.
Who We Are: Two Women, One Shared Frustration
We're Chandni and Elvetia, co-founders of sparrow — a community-first platform for women with textured hair in Germany.
We arrived at the same frustration from completely different directions.
One of us grew up in a culture where beauty was quietly, consistently defined as fair skin and straight hair. Curly hair was called unruly, messy, "too much." You didn't wear it open and natural — you tied it back so you wouldn't look wild. When you hear that long enough, it doesn't just shape your routine. It shapes the way you see yourself.
For the other, it was quieter. No single conversation to point to. Just an accumulation of images — magazines, music videos, adverts — where straight hair was aspirational and textured hair was either absent or a before photo. By the time I was old enough to make my own choices, a lot of the decisions had already been made for me. It took years — a relaxer, braids, kinky twists, eventually shaving my head and starting over — before I found something that felt like mine.
What we learned, separately and then together, is that the challenge of finding the right haircare products isn't just about availability. It's about what it feels like to move through spaces that weren't built with you in mind.
It's about the quiet message you receive when your needs are an afterthought — when products that work for your hair texture are relegated to one small corner of the store, if they're there at all.
And it's not just about products. It's about confidence. About being able to show up as yourself. About not spending an hour trying to decode ingredient lists only to leave empty-handed.
“When you can’t find what you need to feel like yourself, it impacts everything — how you move through the world, how you show up at work, how you feel when you look in the mirror.”
The Gap is Real and the Data Reflects It
More Black and Brown women are calling this place home than ever before — building careers, raising families, creating lives that span continents and cultures. The community is here. But the infrastructure to serve that community hasn't kept up.
The data reflects what many women already feel in their daily lives. Research from NielsenIQ found that 72% of Black consumers agree there is a meaningful gap in beauty product offerings for them. McKinsey research found that Black customers are nearly three times more likely than white customers to be dissatisfied with beauty products available to them — and 1.6 times more likely specifically when it comes to hair care.
Germany has no equivalent published data — which is itself part of the problem. The needs of women of colour with textured hair in Europe are so routinely overlooked that they haven't been systematically studied.
That's what makes this the right moment. Not because the problem is new — it isn't. But because the community that has been navigating it in isolation is finally large enough, vocal enough, and connected enough to deserve something built specifically for them.
And on the other side of that equation, there are brands — many founded by women of colour, many small and underfunded — creating products that genuinely work for textured hair. Products with integrity. With intention. Formulated for people who actually look like us.
Those brands deserve visibility. And the women searching for them deserve to find them without spending hours scrolling comment sections or hoping someone in a WhatsApp group has the answer.
Help Us Build It Right
sparrow is still in its early stages — and that's exactly why your voice matters right now.
We're building sparrow from the lived experiences of women who know this problem from the inside. Before we launch, we want to make sure we're solving the right things, in the right way, for the women who need it most.
That starts with understanding your experience. Not assumptions. Not market research commissioned by people who have never had to hunt for a deep conditioner in a German drugstore. Your actual experience — what you struggle to find, what you wish existed, what would finally make this feel easy.
We've put together a short survey — it takes about five minutes — and every response directly shapes what sparrow becomes.
If you've ever had that quiet conversation — the one where someone asks where you find products and you shrug and say "you just make do" — this is your chance to make sure sparrow gets it right.