Suran owns Silk or Lace, a Plano-based wig marketplace reshaping how women buy, sell and talk about hair loss
Suran Yoo never imagined she would begin losing her hair in her early twenties. As an East Asian woman, she had always felt a part of her identity was tied to it, the way it framed her face, the way it made her feel like herself. So when half her hair fell out within a month of starting birth control, it did not just feel like a medical setback. It felt like losing a piece of who she was.
From Hair Loss To Hope
Suran spent the next five years searching for something that worked. Nothing did. It was not until she got engaged that she discovered hair toppers, and the discovery changed the direction of her life.
At the time, she had never considered wearing a hairpiece, and she noticed most people associated wigs almost exclusively with cancer patients. She started an Instagram account called the_strandie to document her own experience, expecting little. Instead, she found thousands of women quietly going through the same thing.
“I truly felt like I was alone in this because I didn’t know anyone else that was going through hair loss,” she tells Local Profile. At the time, she could count maybe five accounts in the hair loss community. Today there are thousands.
That community became the foundation for something bigger. Suran was in business school when the idea of leaving her corporate marketing job crossed her mind for the first time. She launched Silk or Lace in April 2020 with a mission to make hairpieces more accessible, partnering early on with small artisan brands. Then COVID hit, and China, where most wigs are manufactured, shut down.
“I just thought, if we can’t get what’s from China, we can get them from people’s closets,” Suran says. That instinct became the company’s identity. “So we launched consignment, basically the Real Real but for wigs,” she says, and it now makes up 70% of the company’s inventory.
Silk or Lace also introduced features that were uncommon in the space at the time, including indoor and outdoor lighting photos and videos of each piece, and search filters built around specifics like hair color and cap size.
Why The Stigma Persists
Suran has thought a lot about why hair loss remains something women rarely discuss openly, even though it touches so many. “I think hair is such an intimate part of a woman’s body,” she says, pointing out that other beauty categories, like makeup or lash extensions, do not carry the same shame.
She sees the fragmented, mostly small-business nature of the wig industry as part of the problem, without a major player pushing to shift the conversation. “I don’t see it as a vanity thing,” she says. “I truly think of it as like getting your identity back.”
Growing Community In North Texas
Suran grew up in Champaign-Urbana and worked in Chicago before putting down roots in Texas with her husband. She still considers herself to have a Midwestern soul, but says the entrepreneurial energy in North Texas, especially among women founders, gave her a community she did not expect. Silk or Lace is based in Plano near The Shops at Willow Bend, drawing clients from McKinney, Frisco and Dallas. “We haven’t grown rapidly, but we’ve grown steadily year after year,” she says.
Photo: Suran Yoo
That sense of community carried into how she built the brand online. For anyone building a business around a personal story, Suran says specificity matters more than people think. Rather than building around hair loss broadly, she leaned into her own experience as an Asian American woman navigating it, and later documented the more particular anxiety of managing her hair around her wedding.
“You truly have to dig in and find your authentic voice,” she says. She has also faced her share of criticism online, including people who questioned whether she belonged in the hair loss community since she still had hair of her own. She has come to see that kind of pushback as more about the critic than about her.
Her advice for anyone trying to build a following centers on intentional relationship building. Early on, she chose ten creators of varying sizes to genuinely engage with. “That’s how you make friends in real life, right? You make friends with them,” she says.
The Risk That Changed The Business
Looking back, Suran says launching consignment was the riskiest call she made. “No one sold lightly worn hair pieces online. That was crazy, actually,” she says, recalling another brand in the space calling to wish her luck, clearly skeptical it would work. She mitigated the risk by leaning on the trust the brand had already built, writing detailed listings that were upfront about a piece’s flaws.
That same instinct is shaping what comes next. Silk or Lace is preparing to launch a new feature this year, one Suran has not shared publicly until now. Rather than pushing further into social platforms, the company is building community tools directly into its own site, including consumer profiles where members can talk about their hair loss journeys and comment on products together. The goal is to give the hair loss community, which tends to value privacy and discretion, a place that still feels like it belongs to them.
It is, in a way, the same idea that started it all. What began as one woman quietly documenting her own hair loss on an Instagram account has become a company trying to make sure no one else has to feel as alone in it as she once did.
Learn more about Silk or Lace here.
___
Suran Yoo is one of Local Profile’s 25th annual Women in Business Summit presented by Bank of America on Sept. 18 at the Hilton Granite Park Hotel, Plano. She will join seven other powerhouse women for a full day of inspiring conversations, networking and more.
Tickets are going fast — get yours now!
Don’t miss anything Local. Sign up for our free newsletter.