This Midwestern beauty founder brought her hair care recipes to Baltimore
There's a science to looking good, and Abigail Kuehl thinks she has the formula for making her clients' hair the best it can be.
Kuehl doesn't have a background as a chemist, but she does have more than a decade of experience as a stylist and salon owner. She co-founded the hair care brand Antidote — its name typically appears in all-caps — around 2015 with David Calle, a former Unilever executive.
Antidote produces salon-quality products made from natural ingredients.
In 2021, Kuehl, 37, and her family relocated from Wisconsin to Kingsville in Baltimore County, following Calle, who is also her best friend, to Maryland. She said she has enjoyed it here so far.
In addition to being a wife and mother of three boys while running a company, she's working toward earning a bachelor's degree in business administration and business and environmental economics at Towson University.
"I love being an entrepreneur. It's like a roller coaster — nothing is ever the same," she said. "One day it's a high, the next day it's a low, and you just have to work through those things, and we love that."
Her products are available mostly in Wisconsin salons, but now that she's settled in Baltimore, she's actively seeking to partner with local Maryland companies.
The Baltimore Banner: How did you get into hair care, and what led you to start Antidote?
Abigail Kuehl: I opened a boutique salon in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 2013. It was located in the downtown there, and my goal was to focus on having more of a one-on-one relationship with my clients.
Throughout that time, I had a client who had come in and his partner was relocating — he was working in the Netherlands at the time, because he worked for a much larger company, Unilever, for over 30 years. And that was my business partner, David. I ended up having coffee with him, and that's really the start of Antidote.
We started talking about my clients' needs and the struggles they were having with their hair. For years, I was helping my clients treat issues like dandruff, scalp sensitivity issues and dry, weak, brittle hair. I was making these concoctions, I guess you could say, for them that were more holistic and plant-based. I was doing a lot of research on different plant-based ingredients that could help treat these issues for my clients and they were astounded.
Some of them were made in Mason jars and you had to shake them up in the shower. It was quite a tedious process sometimes, but they were seeing real results from these ingredients. When I had coffee with David, I told him about this. His side was in consumer products and he was like, "Oh my gosh, we loved companies like this. It's a very unique space to be in." So we started talking about how this could look and how we could bring this to scale to help meet the needs of more people.
You went from homemade products in Mason jars to bottles with the company's name on them. When would you say the business became more of focus?
We got together in 2015. If you think about it, there are a lot of natural brands out on the market, but the struggle I had, and my clients had, was finding something that was natural, plant-based and performed for the professional salon.
We're not chemists. I like to think that I am, but we definitely don't have that background. David had a great network of people that he could kind of tap into. We found three different retired chemists who worked on different types of consumer products.
They helped us formulate the ingredients — finding preservatives that were natural and would be shelf-stable for the product and finding ingredients that worked for certain issues. I talked a lot about the scalp issues my clients struggled with, so finding mixtures of ingredients and putting them together to help treat some of those issues.
You moved to Baltimore County during the COVID-19 pandemic for both business and personal reasons. What has it been like for you?
Baltimore is a great hub for new entrepreneurs and businesses. I noticed that a lot just with the networking. I think Baltimore, in a sense, is like how our old hometown was. I mean, it's obviously much bigger, but they definitely encourage new ideas and I think that causes innovation to happen within the community.
What's next for you and Antidote?
Last year, we had a pretty big goal for Antidote. We started out with a bunch of different packaging and our brand name changed slightly. (It was formerly known as ANTIDOTE1848.) We went through a whole rebrand.
We streamlined and incorporated new products and we got rid of some things. We changed the look of the bottle, the labeling, and so for us, that was huge. It took a lot of work. I still feel like I'm recovering from that.
I think the next biggest thing is we are looking to expand. We have a really strong direct-to-consumer business. Right now, we're in about 12 salons, but none of them are located in Maryland. What I'm looking to do, because we're establishing roots here, is take all that rebranding we did last year and find new boutique salons within this area that can help foster the growth of Antidote.
We have such a strong presence in Wisconsin, so we're looking to build that here within a network of really unique salons that are looking for something different within their approach to hair care for their clients.
