August 2026 Hair Care & Skin Care Grant Awarded to Hive Beauty Collective

We’re excited to announce the August $10,000 Business-Category: Hair Care & Skin Care. Congratulations to Blair Whitt, founder of Hive Beauty Collective

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Jama Hernandez sat down with Blair for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Jama: Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Today, we are going to interview our grant winners for the month. We have with us Blair Whitt, and she is with Hive Beauty Collective. She is our business category winner. As you know, August was hair care and skincare, so we’re excited to learn about the unique things that she’s doing with her business. 

Jama: So to get started, please tell us a little bit about your business and who or what inspired your business.

Blair: So I have been doing hair since 2013—just traditional color and cuts and that type of thing—but I’ve also been doing extensions since then.

In 2023, one of my dear clients got in a horrible accident. Her Jeep landed on top of her, and she almost lost her life. But she did survive, and I knew that her hair was really important to her. She lost a lot of hair throughout that whole traumatic process that her body went through, and I just had to find something that I could do for her. There was not a lot available at the time because she didn’t have the traditional methods of attachment, and I knew she wouldn’t want a wig. So I scrounged and found mesh integration training. I did everything I could. I dove in, invested tons of money, and educated myself to the point that there was just nothing else to learn. I did her transformation, and her transformation went viral. People just started coming at me—I mean, people who have permanent hair loss from chemo, alopecia, trichotillomania, which is a hair-pulling disorder that stems from anxiety and OCD and things like that. People just came out of the woodwork wanting help. They wanted something that felt like it was a part of them.

Today, we are providing hair replacement services for women, no matter really what the origin or cause of the hair loss is. We’re working on having our own hairline so that we can cut out the middleman. That’s all in motion right now. We’re also going to create a durable medical equipment company so that these can actually be considered scalp or cranial prosthetics. That way, when women have certain diagnoses, they can possibly be reimbursed through insurance for their hair replacement. And even if their insurance doesn’t really allow for it, they can use FSA or HSA to cover it. So that’s really exciting. There’s actually going to be another arm where we’re doing education to teach these methods to other people, because that’s been another huge demand that we’ve had.

So I am really excited, and my brain is going in a million different directions with the way that this has all exploded. I’m just so thankful to have the grant to help me get started because I have the ideas and I know where we’re called to be, but I just have to have the resources to get there.

Jama: Well, you certainly laid a great foundation. Thank you so much. You have so many awesome things that you’ve already mentioned that make your business unique, but can you tell us something about what makes what you’re doing—your service—different from some of the other extension services or other hair replacement services?

Blair: So first of all, we have a very, very intimate setting. A lot of women come in, and they’re afraid of the setting that they’re walking into. They don’t want to be in a huge, hustle-and-bustle-type salon where they feel like people are already looking at them. They already feel so much stress and anxiety, even if people aren’t looking at them. I want to make sure that we keep everything very private. And then, of course, the women who choose to share their stories—that’s just what they choose to do. And I think that’s great, that they feel that freedom.

And then, secondly, it’s the ability for us to be able to help get their cranial prosthetics reimbursed from insurance where it applies. We can’t control what insurance covers and what it will allow, but we can do everything that we can do on our end with the codes and the documentation and everything to make that more accessible for them.

Jama: That’s major because I know that hurdle with insurance- the paperwork that they’re looking for and all those codes. Thank you so much for putting the energy and the time to be able to do that. That’s pretty incredible!