Crystal Renee Hayslett walked away from a standard influencer deal on her hair care line and took an ownership stake instead, and she credits Tyler Perry for teaching her to think that way.
That decision came up during her conversation on the Baller Alert Show, where she traced the whole path from Martin, Tennessee to Capitol Hill to Tyler Perry Studios to a boardroom seat with a professional soccer team.
The line is ORS Unapologetic, a six-product collection she co-created with ORS Hair Care that launched in April. It is built for curls and coils, anchored by Batana Oil sourced from Honduras and paired with the brand’s proprietary blend, priced between $11.99 and $12.99. What separates it from most celebrity beauty deals is what she actually did with it. She was in the research and development process the entire way, tested every formula on her own natural hair, and sent formulas back when they did not meet her standard. Her line on it is that if it did not perform, it did not pass. When the deal came together, her team locked in equity and ownership rather than a check, plus activations supporting HBCUs.
That is the Tyler Perry lesson in practice. She has said the one thing he pushed on her above everything else was ownership, and on the show she talked about the long-term thinking he encouraged, treating success as something you steward rather than spend.
The other ownership stake is a soccer team, and that one is personal. Hayslett is a co-owner of DC Power FC, the professional women’s club in the USL Super League that plays at Audi Field. She is part of an ownership group that includes Angel Reese, Vernon Davis, Josiah Gray, Hendrix Lapierre, Paxton Baker, and Donovan Pines, alongside DMV business leaders Jan Adams, Devin Talbott, and Jordan Stuart.
Washington is where her adult life started. She earned a degree in mass communication and public relations from the University of Tennessee at Martin, then went to DC as an intern for the United States Senate and later worked as a correspondent for the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee. She left public service for Atlanta to chase entertainment, started in the costume department, joined Tyler Perry Studios as a production assistant, and became his personal stylist before ever getting in front of a camera. Buying into a DC team put her back in the city she came up in, from the other side of the table.
On the acting side, she plays Fatima on Tyler Perry’s Sistas and its spinoff Zatima, the role that made her name. She talked about how deep she goes to get there, and how much the emotional scenes take out of her. Crying scenes in particular carry a real cost, and she described building a practice around emotional regulation and staying positive so the work does not follow her home.
That same instinct shapes how she handles her schedule. She talked about work-life balance and about learning to say no, which is harder when the offers are coming in than when they are not. Her point was that having options does not obligate you to take all of them.
The through line across the whole conversation is that none of the moves were accidental. The equity, the team, the products she personally rejected before approving, the boundaries. She built the second act on purpose.
