How Emi Jay's Julianne Goldmark Revived the Claw Clip for a New Generation

At the age of 14, it’s common for most of us to be laser-focused on preparing to enter high school and navigating the daunting challenges and exciting milestones that come with it. Creating a whole new way to redefine an entire fashion and beauty category may be less of a priority — unless you’re Julianne Goldmark, founder of hair accessories brand Emi Jay.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Goldmark attended The Buckley School, a private (and celebrity-favorite) institution — it counts Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Paris Jackson among its noteworthy alumni — with a mildly restrictive dress code.

“My school uniform was a very mundane skirt and polo, and there was no way to really accessorize anything at the time,” Goldmark tells Fashionista. “We couldn’t wear certain nail polish.”

That’s when the then-teen decided: If she couldn’t express herself through her clothing, why not do it through her hair?

“Since I was four or five years old, I always loved styling my hair. And as someone with very long hair, accessories were always something I really gravitated toward,” says Goldmark. “My grandma would take me to this Korean market that had the most amazing hair accessories, and I remember begging to buy all of them, whether it was a glitter hairbrush or floral hairpins. I always got so excited.”

Soon, Goldmark realized that these hair accessories could be more than a subtle sparkle; instead, they could be a style-defining element of any outfit — particularly for her and her style-constricted classmates. So in 2009, when Goldmark was just 14, Emi Jay was born.

Ahead, the founder, now 28, walks Fashionista through the journey of her company, from engaging in under-the-table business transactions at school to becoming a favorite of “It” clientele like Hailey Bieber, Jasmine Tookes and Emma Chamberlain. Read on for the highlights.

How did you begin making hair accessories, and how did that personal project become Emi Jay?

At first, I started buying elastic headbands from American Apparel and I would get all these gems, feathers, satin ribbons and other materials and hot-glue them to the headbands — just for me to accessorize my school uniform. After I started wearing them to school, my friends wanted them. So I started making some for them, and then I started selling them to more people at school. It all kind of started from there.

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How did Emi Jay begin as a real business outside of school?

I was looking for an elastic to make hair ties that kind of looked like bows. And I’ll never forget, we found underwear elastic at a store called Michael Levine Fabrics in downtown Los Angeles. I bought a bunch, and I started dyeing them in different colors and making tons of headbands and hair ties from them.

And then a couple of things happened: My mom’s friend had a really small boutique and she offered to sell the products on consignment to see how people would respond. At the same time, Chris McMillan, who’s an amazing hairstylist in Los Angeles, was on the search for a hair tie that didn’t dent hair and had a bow-like finish. My business partner at the time’s mom had worked with Chris, so we gave him some of our ties in a box with no branding or anything, and he really loved them. He then put them as one of his favorite, must-have products in a Marie Claire story, which was really exciting. (Editor’s note: Goldmark bought out her former business partner and co-founder, Emily Matson, in 2019.)

The small boutique that we were selling from got so many calls in the weeks after the article came out that we finally said, ‘Maybe we should start a website.’ So we did.

Your mom played a huge role in helping you get Emi Jay off the ground. Did she have any entrepreneurial or business experience beforehand?

No, which is so crazy. We’ve been in business for 15 years, and I think that’s what has taken us so long to figure out, honestly. At age 14, I was in school every single day and had other activities. There’s no way that we could have done this without our moms. To this day, my mom runs the day-to-day operations. I’m more on the design, creative and marketing side, and she’s really running the finance and business side of it all.

What was the first year like for Emi Jay?

The first step we took was finding someone to help us build a website. It was very simple. I started to send the website to my friends who would send it to their friends. We didn’t have a publicist or a PR team and I didn’t have any employees at the time. (The team) was me, my mom, my grandma, my grandma’s friend, my mom’s friend and some of my friends — all dyeing the hair ties in pots in my kitchen. It was very mom-and-pop, for sure.

There’s always been very high-end hair accessories, and then there’s drugstore accessories. The high-end products were more bridal or jewelry-esque and would be a couple hundred dollars for headbands. There was really nothing at a mid-range price point. We wanted to create something that was an everyday, effortless product, but that was a little bit elevated. 

One of my best friends would always wear a drugstore hair clip on the top of her head and she would go through them like they were candy. They would always break, or she would have a new claw clip in her every day. She said to me, “You should really look into making cheaper, more durable claw clips.” So we started researching and playing around with renderings that we felt would be durable enough, like cellulose acetate. 

We launched our clips about a year before the pandemic, and it was obviously really scary to put out a new product when everyone’s home and everything is so uncertain. In the first few weeks, we had very few sales. And then organically, people started seeing photos that we had curated of people at home and in bed with their bedside necessities, and that’s where it started to pick up a little bit.

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Your brand blew up with the help of social media. How did platforms like Instagram impact the growth of Emi Jay, and what was that fast-paced climb like?

It wasn’t until we launched the claw clips that I was finally like, “We need to find someone (for social media) that knows better than me, because I have no idea what I’m doing.” It was a huge investment that we made in order to know who our customer was.

One of the first big social media milestones for the brand was when we started to see user-generated content. We were watching our tagged posts go up and up and up. To see that grow rapidly was the most rewarding and exciting thing — our customers are not only purchasing the product, but they also want to share it with their friends and post about it.

We also had some really amazing women we’ve looked up to from a style perspective post about the brand. Whether it’s Hailey (Bieber) or Kendall (Jenner) or Sofia (Richie Grainge) or any of those amazing tastemakers. A lot of those people are on our moodboards when we’re designing, so to have that stamp of approval is something that I’m forever grateful for. (Editor’s note: Goldmark and Richie Grainge also appear to be friends, per Instagram.)

How has the manufacturing process changed from the start of Emi Jay to now?

It’s changed a lot — especially with wholesale. Our clients and retailers want to see things really far ahead. So we’ve gone from having to plan two months ahead to now having to plan eight-to-10 months ahead. The production process is quick, but the planning of the actual collection takes a long time. We start with a moodboard, and then we’ll pull key textures and elements that we want to see in the collection. Then, a color palette.

We hired our first designer about a year ago, which has been amazing. I obviously have ideas of what I want to see, but we needed extra hands on the design front to make sure that we’re coming out with pieces that are as detailed, unique and strong as possible.

You’ve collaborated with a lot of other brands on limited-edition collections. Is there one that felt most exciting to you?

I think the most special and nostalgic one is definitely our collaboration with Juicy Couture. I feel like a lot of what I love about that brand is what I try to do with Emi Jay. It’s been a mission of mine to create this brand world and story, and I think Juicy did such a good job of that in the early 2000s. I feel like, at that point, every element of Juicy Couture was branded in such a unique way. That partnership was definitely very full circle for me.

What have been the biggest milestones for the business, from starting the brand in your parents’ house to now?

I would say during Emi Jay 1.0, being listed on Oprah’s Favorite Things. That was a huge honor. For Emi Jay 2.0, it was the opportunity to host a pop-up shop and give our customers the chance to feel our product in real life. Being able to meet our customers and see how excited they were was very, very cool.

A lot of dupes have been made of your hair clips. How has this affected the business, and how have you navigated it?

From what I’ve seen, it takes eight-to-10 months to see a dupe. For example, when we did our collaboration with Djerf Avenue, it was in June 2022, and we didn’t see dupes until February 2023. By that time, those items have been sold on our site — our customer base wants the real thing. Even this (July), we had a 50% new customer rate.

As a safety net, we do have proof that we own the design and 3D renderings, which helps to get the sites that are selling the dupes to take those listings down. I know a lot of amazing small designers who have the same issue and can’t copyright their pieces, which is so frustrating for them. So to be able to have the luxury of being able to copyright our designs is something I’m very grateful for.

What are your goals for the business in the next five-to-10 years?

I would love to have a distribution center overseas, so that our international customers don’t have to pay for shipping from the United States. We just partnered with Selfridges online and in-store, so our United Kingdom customers can go on their website and order. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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