Jessica McGuinty, a former Humboldt County resident best known as the founder of the Arcata-based Jessicurl company, has died at age 47, according to a Facebook post published by her husband, Chris Spohn, this morning.
Throughout her life McGuinty had lived with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and the chronic illness finally claimed her life on Saturday, Spohn wrote.
A lifelong roamer and traveler, forever moving from this place to that, McGuinty founded Jessicurl in 2002, after failing to find commercial shampoos and conditioners that suited her hair. Research on early Internet message boards for women with curly hair led her to develop her own, natural recipes, and she soon began bottling her formulas and selling them to others.
Jessicurl grew through her canny marketing — she never tired of telling stories about the merciless cruelties of the straight-haired children at her primary schools in Ontario, Canada — and soon her fledgling company moved into a factory space on West End Road. McGuinty would travel to trade shows to bond with her fellow “curlies,” and eventually became a go-to source when big media wanted to present anything about the plight of the curly-haired.
In 2010 she sold part of the company to a local investment group, partly so that she wouldn’t have to manage its day-to-day operations. She was much happier to be out meeting people and marketing her products.
In 2015, hoping that a warmer climate would improve her health, she moved to Medford and later to southern California, where she met and married her husband. Throughout, she kept her stake in the company she founded, and continued as its public face.
McGuinty was an early colleague for many of us at the Lost Coast Outpost. For years she hosted the weekly “Global Grooves” program on KHUM radio, our sister station, in which she would play music from a different place in the world each week. She was the world number one fan of the Bellingham, Washington-based Yogoman Burning Band, which seemed to play Humboldt three or four times a year for a while there, probably because she made them do so.
She was well and widely loved.
In 2013, McGuinty spoke at a TEDx event about the random, unforeseeable effects that your actions can have on strangers. The recording of that talk can be found below.
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