Gimme Beauty is a personal care brand headquartered in West Valley City, Utah. It was founded in 2006.
Gimme Beauty sells its hair ties in versions for different hair types, and the company says some of them hold more than 70 pounds of pressure. Each band is woven in one continuous loop, so there is no glued seam to give out. That is a lot of engineering for an object that usually ends up under a couch cushion. The brand is run from West Valley City, and its privacy policy still lists an email address at gimmeclips.com.
That address is a clue. Gimme started as hair clips for kids. CEO Jeff Durham has said his sister made the first ones for her daughters out of materials from the family's scrapbooking business, and the clips grew into a children's accessories line called GIMME Clips before the company turned to products for women. Its press releases date the brand to 2006.
Gimme sold to stores before it sold much online. Walgreens became an early customer, Durham said. Target went less well: Gimme built a children's collection of about 40 products under a private label called Lily Jane, and the range disappeared after Target's buying team changed. The company could win shelf space, but it had little direct line to the people buying.
Around 2018 it started putting real money into its own website and into creators who would film the products in use. Gimme later said the business doubled during the pandemic and picked up distribution at Ulta Beauty, and Utah Business now counts more than 25,000 stores that carry it.
The idea that runs through the line is what Durham calls the science of hair type. Brushes for fine hair get shorter, softer bristles, while brushes for thick hair get longer, stiffer ones. The 70-pound figure comes from the company's own testing, and later campaign materials raised it to 80, so read it as Gimme's number rather than a lab certificate.
A hair tie is an inexpensive, familiar thing, so the work goes into making the differences obvious. Durham's pitch to retailers is one price per product and a color code for each hair type, so a shopper can choose in seconds. When the 12-product Dream Curls heatless curl collection launched at Target, it came with the company's first commercial made for television, and the billboards reached Salt Lake City.
Gimme Gives Back started because teachers kept writing to the brand asking for products and supplies for their students. It turns out a hair tie counts as a school supply.
For the Dream Curls launch, Gimme turned the Toasty Badger diner in Austin into a styling stop, and the first 75 visitors got products matched to their hair type.
