Zahir Dossa and the trouble with the perfect shampoo

Zahir Dossa asked his customers a question that sounded perfectly reasonable: what would make this product perfect? The answers refused to agree. People wanted different fragrances, different levels of moisture, different results for different hair. The survey had produced a collection of individual wishes where a tidy product brief might have been more convenient. Dossa decided the wishes deserved a better hearing.

He was running The Argan Tree, a business connecting argan oil producers in Morocco with people buying personal care products. Improving one formula could satisfy some customers while disappointing others. A compromise would still be a compromise. The possibility that caught his attention was more demanding: make each customer’s product separately.

That decision became Function of Beauty. It also explains why Dossa, an engineer with a sustainability doctorate, ended up spending his working life around shampoo. His interest was in the organization behind the bottle: who specified it, who made it, who received the value. A bathroom shelf proved to be a surprisingly good place to investigate those questions.

The answers refused to agree

The Argan Tree began in 2009, during Dossa’s years at MIT. Its business model connected customers with a cooperative of 60 women in Morocco. Internet commerce offered a way to shorten the distance between the people producing argan oil and the people buying products made with it. His research had acquired a checkout button.

By 2013, the venture appeared in MIT’s account of his doctoral work as an example of putting a business model into practice. The cooperative, the online connection and the distribution of profits belonged to the design of the enterprise. They were matters to work out before asking someone to admire the packaging.

The questions customers raised opened a second problem. Preferences varied too much for one supposedly ideal shampoo to settle them. Dossa could keep adjusting the formula, or he could reconsider the assumption that everybody should receive the same one. He chose the latter. It was an expensive-sounding answer to a very ordinary complaint.

The leap carries a certain academic neatness: a researcher examines how businesses work, starts one, and discovers that his own customers have supplied another research question. The untidy part arrives afterward. Individual preferences have to become ingredients, instructions, equipment and orders that leave the building.

“I realized every single person was actually unique and wanted to be celebrated for it.”

Zahir Dossa, 2018

A pump before a bottle

Long before custom hair care, Dossa worked with MIT student Mustafa Dafalla on Selsabila, a nonprofit intended to bring inexpensive irrigation pumps to farmers in Sudan. The pumps were made in India and powered by a person stepping on treadles. The project involved finding local managers, dealing with a manufacturer and getting equipment into farmers’ hands.

The proposed price was $100 per pump. The initial ambition in 2008 was to distribute at least 100. Those were concrete quantities attached to a concrete task. Water still had to reach the crops. A useful machine required a workable route to the person who would use it.

Dossa’s undergraduate education combined electrical engineering and computer science with management science. He continued through an engineering master’s degree and doctoral study, receiving a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship in 2010. His interests in technology and business were already accompanied by work in international development.

At MIT’s iHouse, where he served as program coordinator, he helped develop a community organized around international projects, mentoring and leadership. The work included addressing students’ concern that they were being sent toward international projects without enough preparation to manage them. Practical execution kept finding its way onto the agenda.

His family had crossed borders well before he began crossing disciplines. Born in Canada, he moved from the Toronto area to Texas at ten. His parents had been born in Tanzania; his grandparents in India. His father’s video store had faced the arrival of Blockbuster. The family’s story contained its own encounter with a business model changing underneath someone.

Twenty-seven trillion ways to avoid an average

Function of Beauty was founded in 2015 by Dossa, Joshua Maciejewski and Hien Nguyen, now Hien Nguyen Kaplan. Maciejewski brought engineering and operational experience; Nguyen Kaplan brought formulation chemistry. Dossa worked on the customer experience and business. The concept needed all three kinds of attention.

A questionnaire could collect someone’s preferences. Chemistry had to turn those preferences into a formula. The production system then had to put that formula into a bottle. Each step created obligations for the next. A lovely website could do very little about a filling line built to repeat the same recipe all day.

The company joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch. By October 2018, Dossa reported 120 employees and an automated fulfillment milestone: one of 27 trillion possible formulations in eight seconds. That was his description of the system’s range and speed at the time, rather than a count of bottles sold or a promise about today’s delivery time.

The numbers are easier to understand beside the unglamorous problem they address. A factory generally gains efficiency by doing the same thing repeatedly. Here, the founders needed efficiency while allowing the product to change. The machine was part of the original proposition.

Dossa’s advice to prospective founders reflected that interdependence: choose a significant problem and assemble a team equipped to solve it. Function’s division of labor gives the advice some substance. He could design the online experience. He still needed somebody who knew what should go into the bottle, and somebody who knew how to get it there.

A name big enough to read

Dossa also paid attention to the pleasures that sat outside the formula. Color, fragrance and a name on the bottle made the object feel like something a person had chosen. Customers began photographing their products. The company could observe what they were responding to and change the design accordingly.

Early packaging had used muted, spa-like colors. As the brand developed, it became brighter and more playful. Names became larger. A vertical layout gave them room on the bottle. The customer’s contribution could be read at a glance, which is rather useful when the customer has decided to take its photograph.

In a 2019 interview about social media, Dossa was asked what made him an authority on the subject. “Frankly, I’m not,” he replied. He wanted to make a product people would enjoy sharing. The modest answer was followed by a fairly practical observation: names and colors gave customers something recognizable and personal to show.

There was room for embarrassment elsewhere. Dossa once arrived at an investor meeting without researching Adam D’Angelo and asked whether he understood the technical side. D’Angelo’s background included Facebook and founding Quora. He invested anyway. Few preparation failures receive such forgiving financing.

That story is a useful interruption to the polished founder biography. Dossa could be deliberate about an experience and still blunder into a meeting. His explanation of the error was uncomplicated: know whom you are going to meet. The bottle might be customized; the homework remains fairly standard.

The scale of a promise

In December 2020, Function of Beauty announced a $150 million strategic minority investment from L Catterton, with CircleUp and GGV also reinvesting. The company said it sold in 45 markets and employed more than 400 people across three locations. The customer-by-customer idea now required an organization large enough to support international demand.

The investment was intended to support product development, expansion and manufacturing. The founders had built their own production facilities in Pennsylvania because the system they needed was unavailable ready-made. Filling equipment had been designed, built and coded internally. Buying the machinery off a convenient shelf had proved rather less straightforward than selling the shampoo.

Growth also exposed the distance between an individualized product and an individualized experience. In early 2021, Dossa discussed longer lead times and difficulties getting orders to international customers. He acknowledged the challenge of communicating those delays. A formula tailored to someone’s wishes still has to arrive.

Retail introduced another version of the problem. For the Target launch, shoppers could select a shampoo and conditioner base for straight, wavy, curly or coily hair, then add boosters for selected goals. The mixing happened at home. Customization had acquired a different format to fit a different place of purchase.

Dossa described the Target project as an 18-month collaboration. It required the company to carry its idea into an aisle where people expected to pick up a bottle immediately. His stated ambition was to make customization commonplace. That ambition needed more than one way for a customer to encounter it.

A book, a chair, and a guest bedroom

The sustainability research continued into authorship. Dossa and Francisco Szekely co-wrote Beyond the Triple Bottom Line: Eight Steps toward a Sustainable Business Model, published by MIT Press in 2017. It asks businesses to begin with a societal need and use profitability to support an organization capable of addressing it.

The book moves through the practical work of setting a vision, choosing a strategy and implementing change. It won bronze in the sustainability category of the 2018 Axiom Business Book Awards; a paperback edition followed in August 2024. A founder’s interest in operating systems can apparently fit between covers as well as behind a filling line.

In September 2021, Alexandra Papazian became Function of Beauty’s CEO and Dossa moved to executive chairman. The company appointed Monica Belsito CEO in July 2025, with a brief spanning retail and direct-to-consumer growth. His story now includes the handoff, alongside the experiments and the launch.

There are smaller details, too. As a child, Dossa wanted to be an astronaut. By 2021 he was living in Miami, after previously commuting to New York, and had installed a golf simulator in a guest bedroom. He described choosing Brickell because he still wanted shops and people around him. Space exploration had yielded to a more conveniently located pursuit.

The shampoo business began with an equally human detail: people would not agree. Dossa allowed that disagreement to change the product, then helped build an organization that could act on it. His customers had supplied the complications. He and his co-founders accepted the engineering assignment.