When you're doing something that hasn't been done before, and you're trying to build something that hasn't been built before on a platform that hasn't existed before, you are going to make mistakes. The biggest advice that I can give is to not run away from issues when they occur. Own it. Your consumers deserve that.
Like so many women aspiring and working to create the life they desire, Madam Walker lived with a vision that was beyond her time - a vision for the way that things could be, not the way they were.
You could say I was born into entrepreneurship. My grandmother, who was from Sierra Leone, was left to raise four children in the 1940s in a rural village in West Africa after becoming a young widow. To support her family, she made natural skin and hair care preparations and sold them primarily to missionaries and villagers.
By questioning the very concept of a normal standard, especially as it applies to beauty and to hair type or texture, we can begin to see how arbitrary, narrow, and potentially destructive it is and course-correct ourselves on a path to where everybody gets love.
I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to go to college in the United States. By the time I graduated, we had a full-blown civil war in both Liberia and Sierra Leone. I couldn't go home.
Our mission is to serve women of color and serve them deeply.
Our forward track must focus on including everyone, embracing everyone, and celebrating the beauty - and normalcy - of everyone's differences.
There's something about 'Essence' that we more than like - that we really love: the history of the community, the forward-thinking leadership.
I'm very focused on giving back, investing, and growing my community.
My mother, Mary, has been a guiding force for as long as I can remember through the examples she's set as a single mother. She demonstrated her confidence and faith in me by investing everything in me and the business at a time when she had just lost everything.
I am excited Sundial and Unilever have created this partnership, rooted in a purpose-driven ethos, that represents an incredible opportunity to take our Community Commerce economic empowerment and impact model to another level.
I was born and raised in Liberia in West Africa. My mother is Sierra Leonean, and my father's Liberian. I grew up at a time when there was a lot of civil unrest in both countries, so when something would happen in Liberia, we'd go to Sierra Leone, and when something would happen in Sierra Leone, we'd go back to Liberia. We moved to save our lives.
As a kid growing up, one of the brands I thought was tremendous was Karl Kani... and I don't see Karl Kani today. I want to see SheaMoisture tomorrow.
We need to be able to express ourselves and to show the world who we are and how we are.
We were presented with limited opportunities to get distribution when we went to retail, so we made the hard decision to build the brand and win the community first.
Once a company develops out of its consumer base, you will often see a well-funded multinational company come in and take over that space. The black-owned company either stays a niche company or just disappears. This is something we don't want to happen.
My father ran an insurance company, but he passed away when I was 8. My mother was an economist working for the government of Liberia. But both my grandmothers were entrepreneurs in rural West Africa.
A critical lesson I learned is that we have to make sure all our employees, particularly new hires, have a full immersion in our culture.
One of the hardest things to do is to get capital. That's where we, as black business, struggles. And the other place we struggle is scale, and because we don't have an access to capital, we cannot scale.
There's no need for women and moms to go through this world alone without the help and the support from the businesses that do business in our communities and that generate success from the women in our community. That should not be happening.
