Long Hair, Do Care. Sustainability is More Than an Accessory for Gina-Maria Garcia—It’s a Lifestyle.

Blue and gold curls blend with Gina-Maria Garcia’s natural brown tresses. The colorful extensions, or Spirit Clips, complement her University of California, Los Angeles T-shirt. Though it isn’t game day at UCLA, it is game on for Garcia. Football season is near, and the BUYa Beauty founder’s got the winning accessories. On this August afternoon, she’s nearby campus to share her hair extensions with salons and sports stores who’ll soon welcome Bruins fans.

Sure, the extensions look great, but they feel even better, says Garcia. Curl them, crimp them, and wash them to style all over again. Made from real human hair (as opposed to synthetic fibers), her extensions inspire confidence in wearers—but that’s just the start. BUYa Beauty’s sustainability mission also encourages wearers to be mindful consumers. A portion of Spirit Clips proceeds contributes to BUYa Beauty’s partnership with Matter of Trust, a San Francisco-based ecological nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting sustainable interventions.

“What better way to empower women than to give them a product that could help them solve real problems in this world,” says Garcia, who studied journalism while an undergraduate student at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design. Relationships with sustainability-minded organizations such as the UCLA Store and Matter of Trust, she says, are a “huge deal” for BUYa Beauty. Though she officially launched in 2021, Garcia’s market research has been more than a decade in the making.

Back in high school, Garcia says, she had the “longest, thickest, most beautiful hair ever.” But she remembers when, at 16, undiagnosed depression and untreated infectious mononucleosis, or mono, left her without an appetite. Before long, she started losing her hair. As she recovered, her mom took her shopping for extensions to bolster her locks and her confidence.

“I was so excited that I put them all in,” says Garcia, who was soon teasing and styling her many layers. As she perfected her look, she decided to take her favorite accessory to the next level—more full, more discreet—and developed her very own prototype. The first step was, of course, sourcing the human hair itself. So, Garcia placed an order online for samples. She remembers opening the box to find “the worst quality hair that [she] had seen in [her] whole life.” She couldn’t help but ask: Whose hair is that? And where did it come from?

Garcia set out to investigate the source, just as she did in her classes and on Dialogue of Civilizations reporting trips to Jordan and Spain with Carlene Hempel, teaching professor in Northeastern’s journalism department.

“That is the reporter mindset,” says Hempel of Garcia’s commitment to understand the full picture of the human hair extensions industry. “She was on a fact-finding mission.”

The years-long investigation brought Garcia up and down the hair supply chain—from collecting samples to processing and manufacturing them. She discovered that landfills and labor camps around the world were often the suppliers at the root of products sold in the United States.

“It’s a very secretive business with a lot of dark and unethical practices that I wasn’t comfortable with,” Garcia reflects.

Beyond sourcing, the actual production of hair extensions also confounded Garcia. Overprocessing with chemicals means that a sizable portion of hair is often damaged and lost along the way. To make up the difference, synthetic or “mysterious”—a word that Garcia uses to encompass the industry’s shortcomings and shortcuts—fibers become supplements to build out a customer’s pack. By the time extensions reach them, Garcia says, the product is an infinite number of degrees separated from the heads at the start of the supply chain. With BUYa Beauty, though, Garcia wants to rewrite the look book. Her human hair extensions are like “farm-to-table dining,” she says, only they’re “head-to-head beauty.”

Garcia calls the process “incredibly empowering.” She’s cut the hair of willing sellers on her own trips overseas. As women negotiate their own prices, they often share with Garcia their intentions for the profits. After a rain storm depleted one woman’s harvest in Southeast Asia, says Garcia, the seller cut her hair for more rice seed. Another told Garcia that she’d put the money toward wedding gifts for her nieces and nephews.

BUYa Beauty, and its ethical, sustainable practices, are a manifestation of Garcia’s journalism background, she says. She knows how to dig deeper, and—because she’s a newcomer to the beauty industry—she’s able to see its strengths and injustices from a “different angle.”

“You have to know what you don’t know, and then go after the answers to those questions,” agrees Hempel. She calls Garcia a true “global citizen,” striving to make a difference in whichever corner of the world she finds herself.

Garcia’s commitment to elevate and democratize the human hair industry impressed Women Who Empower judges at this year’s Innovator Awards. Among young undergraduate alumnae honorees, Garcia received third place recognition.

The annual awards, spearheaded by Northeastern’s Office of University Advancement, welcome new cohorts of entrepreneurs to a global network of peers and mentors from across the university’s schools and colleges. It’s equal parts celebration and financial incubator, as founders pitch their ideas for a chance at funds to reinvest in their businesses. In just three years, more than $820,000 has been dispersed—including this year’s record-setting $500,000—to enterprising thought leaders like Garcia. To date, she says, she’s used $45,000 in grants from Northeastern initiatives like the Innovator Awards and venture accelerator IDEA to grow BUYa Beauty.

The journey to market—and a saturated one at that—has been challenging for Garcia. That’s because education has been both an opportunity and an obstacle for her company. In the early days, as Garcia embarked on a salon roadshow to promote her first extensions, she felt as if she carried a metaphorical bullhorn. She was the voice for an underexplored and overwhelming problem that stylists and customers were new to confront. Though they’re catching up with Spirit Clips, that gap in knowledge has delayed, and transformed, Garcia’s hair extensions movement.

Remember her first prototype? Garcia was her own customer for the handwoven, easy-to-conceal product intended to fill out a wearer’s hair. She spent two years marketing that initial design to celebrity stylists before realizing that it wasn’t, contrary to her mission, sustainable to maintain. The business-to-business model came with a higher price point; that, combined with minimal awareness about the complex industry, Garcia says, were barriers to widespread adoption by new customers.

“I had to make the hard decision as an entrepreneur to completely pivot my business by offering a different product,” she says. At first, it felt like an “identity crisis” for the founder—though her previous experience in luxury marketing with brands such as Magellan Jets and Mercedes-Benz helped her to embrace her next move.

She realized that, because her initial concept was designed to go unnoticed, it’d always come with an inherent “problem for going viral.” Around that time, Garcia shopped around sports stores for gear to support the Los Angeles Rams in the Super Bowl. When she found limited options in the women’s section, she dyed her BUYa Beauty pieces blue and gold. She clipped them in for a Super Bowl party, and the compliments rolled in.

Garcia had inadvertently created the Christian Louboutin of human hair extensions, she says now. (Think about those can’t-miss red soles.) Her bright accessories would be a way for the wearer to express themself through style, she says, but they’d also act as a visual cue for the quality of the hair they’re sourced from.

The “why” of BUYa Beauty—empowerment, ethicality, environment—emerged in conversation with Garcia’s late business mentor Michael S. Saddik, she says. She remembers arriving at the Cubano Room, his favorite cigar lounge in Newport Beach, with her tentative business plan in hand. He encouraged her, even if just for a moment, to think less about the plan and more about her purpose. Her holistic solution for problematic extensions emerged.

“He really set me on this path for caring deeply about what I’m doing,” Garcia says. And breakthroughs followed. Saddik was a sounding board and a patient test audience before big pitches, and he was an established voice that landed Garcia in rooms she may not have entered otherwise, she says. Saddik passed shortly before her Spirit Clips launch, but Garcia believes he’s witness to her success just the same.
“It’s kind of cool to think that I have a business mentor on the other side,” she says. “He can see things that I can’t see.”

Garcia has set her sights on an expanding list of university clients as Spirit Clips gain traction. If she has her way, extensions to celebrate her Red and Black pack may be on the horizon. Northeastern pride runs in her family, after all. Her parents met on campus, and her sister followed in their footsteps when she enrolled. Garcia joined the Northeastern family soon after.

“I want to be wearing my Huskies T-shirt, and my Huskies hair!”

The physical manifestation of Garcia’s tenacity and experiential attitude, honed inside and outside of Northeastern classrooms, would make total sense for Hempel.

“She’s doing it,” she says of Garcia’s startup mindset. “And she’s doing it on her terms.”