Meet Lisa Price
In May of 1993, Lisa Price founded the hairand skincare brand, Carol’s Daughter, in the kitchen of her Brooklyn apartment. Nearly 23 years later, in front of a packed auditorium as part of the Bright Lights, Green Sights speaker series, she reflected on those early days. In the beginning, she said, customers showed up on her stoop at 10pm, rang her doorbell, and, having heard about her business from friends, requested shampoo. In the beginning, as she mixed ingredients and tested new products, her focus remained on one concern—not marketing, not customer acquisition, but “let me not blow up this building.”
Her entrance into the market for multicultural hair and skincare products came at an auspicious moment. In the early nineties, the “going natural” movement was taking hold: women, typically African-American, were avoiding relaxer, a potent chemical compound that they used to straighten their hair. Instead, they were opting to wear their hair natural. But, with this decision, they faced a dearth of hair-care products. In 1993, stores offered, “‘the ethnic aisle,’ and it wasn’t an aisle, it was about three shelves, and it was dirty, and the products were on the bottom,” said Price. As she set out to fill this niche with a business of her own, she realized “how deprived I was for my own hair, how much I was just settling” for sub-standard products.
Carol’s Daughter grew quickly. In 1999, she opened a storefront in Fort Greene, Brooklyn; in 2002, she appeared on the Oprah show; in 2005, she opened a flagship store in Harlem and partnered with celebrity investors, including Jay-Z, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. Soon after that, she launched on the Home Shopping Network, where Carol’s Daughter became the number one hair-care brand by 2011. And in 2014, L'Oréal USA purchased Carol’s Daughter. This was the “endgame,” said Price. “That’s what I needed. That’s what I wanted.”