As long as there have been graduations, there have been people with curly and textured hair frustrated by poor-fitting grad caps. On the eve of her high school graduation, Myayla Wright and her parents decided to finally do something about it.
“I’m sitting there trying to figure out how to fit this graduation cap over my hair, and there was just no way,” said Wright, a junior from Olathe, Kansas. “I was talking to my parents and was just like, ‘There’s no way there’s nothing for this — graduations have been happening forever.’”
Weeks later, the family was in their basement firing up a 3D printer to make prototypes of the Grad Cap Remix — a device that fits into a standard graduation cap and utilizes a unique headband that accommodates all hairstyles, curly or straight. Three years and a patent later, Wright and her family’s venture has taken off in ways they could never have imagined.
“The feedback has been amazing,” Wright said. “We get all kinds of comments like: ‘This saved my graduation day,’ ‘I’m so glad this exists,’ or ‘Why wasn’t this around sooner?’”
Wright was excited to discover that the product is helping people in more ways than one.
“We get a lot of orders from people with sensory disorders or cochlear implants because it’s cleaner and simpler for them,” Wright said. “For people who wear hijabs, it works way better as well. It helps a lot of people that we didn’t think it would.”
Wright knew they were onto something big when a TikTok she posted showing off the insert gained massive traction.
“One TikTok I made blew up with 40 million views,” said Wright, who handles social media and marketing for Grad Cap Remix on top of being a student athlete on the Husker Cheer Squad and keeping up with her nutrition, exercise and health science major.
“I keep up with hashtags, trending sounds and things that capture an audience so our content can work within those trends.”
Aiming to partner with large regalia suppliers, Wright expects Grad Cap Remix to become a staple of graduations everywhere — including here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She’s been asked by everyone from her teammates on the cheer team to total strangers asking about getting an insert.
“It makes me excited that even on my own campus people are interested in using one,” she said.
