Cordina Hair Quits Social Media After 110 Million Views
For the best part of a decade, Cordina Hair grew up in public. It began as an idea that founder
Yanika Cordina prototyped in a garden shed, which is about as far from a glossy beauty launch as it could possibly get, and it went on to sell globally on the strength of social media alone. Its content gathered more than 110 million organic views without a penny spent on adverts, and even won an award for the growth it drove. So when the company decided to quit social media, it wasn’t the decision of someone who’d never understood its pull.
“So when I say what I’m about to say, I’m not speaking as someone who never understood the appeal,” says Yanika. “I built the whole thing on social media.”
Some of that reach came from people the company never expected to hear from. Top beauty creators and celebrities, who would usually charge a great deal to talk about a product, bought Cordina Hair’s tools with their own money and shared them because they genuinely loved them. For a small brand making original and patented products, without the marketing budget of the big beauty houses, it was the kind of support money simply couldn’t have bought.
“We were incredibly lucky,” Yanika says. “A lot of companies would do anything to have those creators and celebrities talking about their products, and for us it happened organically. I’m forever grateful to every one of them for sharing their love for the products. It’s been a really interesting social media journey, so you can imagine how difficult it is to walk away from it.”
The wheel stops turning
The engine behind that growth was relentless. Filming, editing and posting something new every single day, for years on end, is a wheel that only ever turns one way, and it was always going to stop eventually, whether because of the algorithm or the person turning it. In the end, with the kind of timing nobody would choose, it was both at once. Videos that once reached millions started reaching a few hundred people, or a few thousand on a good day.
It would be easy to put that down to a small business stretched too thin, but the company had already shared the load. Cordina Hair worked with its own customers, the people who actually used and loved the products, through paid partnerships and a brand ambassador programme, so the content kept coming and stayed genuine. The problem wasn’t a staffing one. The content simply wasn’t reaching people any more, because the platforms had quietly decided that being seen was something you paid for.
The drop was more than a knock to morale. It showed just how much the company had come to rely on platforms it didn’t own or control, and trying paid ads for the first time only proved how different, and how costly, that game had become.
A piece of the pie
Reaching millions of people also came with a less welcome side effect. When copycats see a company doing well on social media, they want a piece of the pie. People stole Cordina Hair’s videos and images, sometimes even editing them to fit their own brand, and passed off both the content and the product as their own, while its patented designs were copied and sold illegally as cheap dupes.
The company has since removed more than 2,200 infringements, with new ones still turning up every week, and it’s hard to ignore the irony that the same feed that spreads an original idea is just as good at spreading the copies. Social media fuels dupe and copy culture, and it's the brands with original ideas that are left to deal with the infringements and copies.
Between the social media hamster wheel and the endless copies, its founder was running on empty.
“Tired is not really the word for it, because I was burnt out,” Yanika says.
“The same feed that spreads an original idea is just as good at spreading the copies.”
Quitting social media when your business runs on it
When the pause finally came, it was for the most human of reasons. Cordina Hair stopped posting as its founder stepped back during her pregnancy and the early months with her baby, and what was meant to be a short breather turned into a long and deliberate silence, with nothing posted at all. Not posting turned out to be the easy part, and the habit was another matter entirely.
“My hands hadn’t caught up with the decision,” she says. “It was pure muscle memory. The moment I picked up my phone, my thumb would find Instagram and start scrolling before my brain had any say in it. That kind of scrolling had always been part of the job, because you have to know what’s trending and what people are talking about, and yet I had never enjoyed it. It quietly swallowed hours of my day, so I made the decision I never thought I would and deleted Instagram and TikTok off my phone.”
For a business run almost entirely through those apps, it was a little like a florist deciding to give up flowers.
“I genuinely never thought I would, given that I had run an entire business through social media apps,” Yanika says. “What surprised me most was the relief that followed, and all the time I got back, which I started spending elsewhere.”
The phone, in other words, has gone back to being a phone, and the kettle, she’s pleased to report, still works.
“I don’t want my own work sitting in the middle of that feed.”
“The honest truth is that I have fallen out of love with social media,” she says. “The brain-rot content genuinely angers me now, the engineered hooks get under my skin, and some of what I have seen on there I simply cannot unsee. There are questionable people doing questionable things, and images and videos that have stayed with me long after I wished them gone. I don’t want any more of it. And I don’t want my own work sitting in the middle of that feed, nudging someone to keep scrolling when there are far better things they could be doing with their time.”
She isn’t alone in feeling that way. People are working hard to get off their phones and out of the feed, and they can tell when they’re being sold to. There’s a lot of anger online now, and even the hooks that once stopped a thumb mid-scroll are starting to wear thin.
“People know when they’re being sold to, and a lot of them are tired of it,” Yanika says. “Even the hooks are starting to annoy people. I don’t blame them. I feel exactly the same way.”
Something rather more
For Cordina Hair, this is where principle meets the numbers. Organic reach barely moves any more, being seen increasingly has to be paid for, and people are clearly tired of a feed that nobody finishes feeling better than when they started. Plenty of people have stepped away from it, but far fewer businesses do, because for a business it’s a genuine risk, and a rather odd one at that.
The company is taking that risk on purpose. The long quiet has made it clear what matters, what drains, and where the brand goes next.
“Coming back stronger means leaving behind the one thing that reliably drains me, and for me, that thing is social media.”
After its long pause, Cordina Hair is getting ready to return, though not in the way it left.
“Stepping away from social media has been life-changing for me. It brought me back to who I am, what matters to me and how I want to run my company,” Yanika says. “When I have an idea, it isn’t always about hair, and I want the freedom to follow those ideas and share them with our audience and the world.”
Cordina Hair started with hair tools, and it’s now growing into something rather more. The new direction is quietly taking shape, away from the scroll, and subscribers will be the first to hear about it. Join more than 55,000 women on the mailing list to see what comes next, no algorithm required.
