After twenty-six years in a high-stress utility sales career, a pandemic, and a breast cancer diagnosis, the Minnesota inventor turned a decade-long tinkering project into the GentleStyle Brush.
By Greg Rollett, Grommet
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A silicone sleeve from a water bottle. A broken-off piece of a hair diffuser. One tight twist of a hair tie holding the whole thing together. It’s the kind of contraption you’d see on a DIY forum at 2 a.m. For Cherie Monson, on vacation more than a decade ago, it was supposed to be the answer.
She had thin, straight hair that needed a diffuser to do what she wanted it to do. She had a suitcase that couldn’t fit two bulky hair dryers. And she had a clever little hack that worked perfectly on her round dryer back home.
Then she got to the resort and met the dryer mounted to the bathroom wall. Rectangular.
“In that moment, I realized the better solution wasn’t the dryer at all. The diffuser needed to live on a handle, like a brush.”
-Cherie Monson, inventor of the GentleStyle Brush
Twenty-six years, then a nudge
For most of her working life, Cherie was not in the beauty business. She spent twenty-six years as a sales consultant in new construction at a natural gas utility. Long hours. Big stakes. The kind of high-stress career that doesn’t leave room for a side project involving broken brush bristles and (eventually) toilet plungers.
But the idea kept humming in the background for fifteen years. Cherie’s late father had taught her to solve problems by inventing what she needed, and this particular problem wouldn’t leave her alone.
When COVID arrived, then burnout, then a breast cancer diagnosis, she started to hear what she calls “the nudge.”
“Guided by intuition, faith, and the influence of my late father, I finally listened. I finally took the idea, and myself, seriously.”
The naked brush
The first real prototype was not pretty. She removed the bristles from one of her hairbrushes and screwed a piece of an old diffuser onto the handle. It worked so well she never went back to using her original diffuser.
Over the next decade she kept refining it. Creatively destroying and repurposing other brushes and styling tools, testing what worked and what didn’t. The final prototype was intentional: diffuser “fingers” borrowed from one of her own dryer attachments, vents cut in for airflow, and a head shaped to be both round and square at once to strengthen her design patent. At the last minute, she added an air-concentrator attachment to expand styling options. Her nephew 3D-printed the whole thing.
The handle was inspired by something a little less glamorous.
“The handle that worked best was inspired by the ridged plastic handle of my toilet plunger. Ironically.”
A discovery she didn’t expect
Then came the second, quieter revelation. During breast cancer treatment, radiation-related hair thinning made her hair far more vulnerable than it had ever been. She kept reaching for her homemade prototype out of habit. And she noticed something: it detangled more gently than anything she’d ever tried.
The first time she used her own design after her hair started growing back, there were only a few strands in the brush. She stopped losing hair in the shower immediately. For the first time since treatment, she felt a sense of relief and control again.
“In that moment, I understood the tool wasn’t just about styling or volume,” she says. “It was about care.”
Nine months of “no”
Finding a manufacturer nearly ended the project. Cherie spent nine months searching for someone she could actually afford as a first-time inventor. Three months in, she was ready to move forward with a U.S.-based manufacturer in Minnesota that a friend had used. At the last minute, they decided not to take on a complex consumer product.
The next six months were all quotes, cost calculations, and dead ends. Eventually she turned to her Women Inventors Facebook group for advice. Multiple people recommended Carmine Denisco, President of the United Inventors Association and founder of EarMark Sourcing. After talking with him and exploring her options, she chose to manufacture in South Korea, where she could produce the brush at a realistic cost with lower minimum order quantities. She wanted to manufacture in the U.S., but the overseas option allowed her to move forward without needing massive market validation first.
The first people to truly believe in her idea, besides herself, were her sister and her hairstylist. For four years, both of them had encouraged her to patent it, even when she kept insisting she couldn’t afford to. Her sister is naturally skeptical, so her belief carried real weight. Her hairstylist watched her use the tool during appointments and saw the results firsthand.
More than a brush
The GentleStyle Brush launched on Grommet in October 2025. It’s a patented 2-in-1 detangling and styling tool with a snap-on diffuser, designed for fine and thinning hair. BPA-free, heat-resistant, dishwasher-safe. It replaces multiple styling tools at once and works on wet or dry hair.
But what stays with Cherie isn’t the product specs. It’s the feedback.
One of the first messages came from a breast cancer survivor who told her that gentleness remained important long after treatment was behind her. She called the brush “exactly that: gentle.” Not long after, Cherie started hearing from men with natural curls who found it detangled without disrupting their curl pattern or causing frizz.
For Cherie, success goes far beyond sales. In 2024 and 2025, she helped bring HerScan affordable breast ultrasound screenings to her community, making early detection available to people who might not have pursued it otherwise. Long term, she wants to sponsor brushes for breast cancer patients and partner with organizations that support women in treatment. If the GentleStyle Brush can be both a practical tool and a vehicle for care, advocacy, and compassion, that’s real success to her.
Being part of the Grommet community matters, too. “Unlike marketplaces driven by pay-per-click and algorithms, Grommet introduces products through storytelling and discovery, then connects customers directly to the founder,” she says. “Being part of that kind of community feels aligned, encouraging, and deeply meaningful to me.”
Trust the timing
Cherie likes to say the journey taught her to trust timing as much as ideas. The GentleStyle Brush didn’t come together all at once, and neither did she. Both evolved through patience, persistence, and listening to real needs, real feedback, and her own intuition.
Somewhere between the rectangular dryer at that resort, the hairbrush she took a pair of pliers to, and the toilet plunger she cribbed a handle from, she built the thing she’d been needing for fifteen years. It just happens to be exactly what a lot of other people needed, too.
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