Madam C.J. Walker was the first person to devise and scale a business model that addressed the hair care and beauty needs of women of color while also challenging the myopic ideals of the beauty industry at that time.
— Richelieu Dennis
We began Sundial Brands as young entrepreneurs, and as we move forward towards our goal of becoming the number one global family company serving our communities in a way that is aligned with their needs and our core values, we will always be entrepreneurs.
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.
We understand that we, as a brand, have transcended a brand, and we are part of our cultural identity, and there's a responsibility that comes with that.
Our love of people has always been our motivation and our competitive advantage.
We need to be able to express ourselves and to show the world who we are and how we are.
We started our company out of a need to survive, but we've built it based on a mission not only to help others survive but to prosper. Because of that, our purpose - to empower people to live more beautiful lives - compels us to keep community at our core.
One of our missions has been to create an all-natural hair care line that caters to meet the unique needs of multi-ethnic consumers, which has traditionally been an underserved group in the mass market.
There's something about 'Essence' that we more than like - that we really love: the history of the community, the forward-thinking leadership.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We started our company out of a need to survive, but we've built it based on a mission not only to help others survive but to prosper. In fact, we view ourselves as a mission with a business, rather than a business with a mission.
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.
My whole life has been about building community, building business in our community, empowering people in our community.
I'm very focused on giving back, investing, and growing my community.
This natural-hair movement has opened up the door for us to do so many things, for us to have conversations that we weren't able to have. We need this in our communities.
I am proud of all of our products across every category we're in - hair, bath and body, face, cosmetics, baby, and men's - because they reflect the highest quality natural, organic, fair trade, and community commerce-sourced ingredients available.
Our forward track must focus on including everyone, embracing everyone, and celebrating the beauty - and normalcy - of everyone's differences.
Our mission is to serve women of color and serve them deeply.
My grandmother was a single mother. My mother's a single mother, and I have four daughters. I've experienced firsthand the challenges of what it is to be a single mother. And many of those challenges are challenges that, if we all just got together and worked together and thought about it together, we could help solve.
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.
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.
We want women to have options and not be forced into somebody else's idea of what their beauty needs ought to be.
As our company grew and we began growing our family stateside - with heritages ranging from Liberian and Sierra Leonean to Irish, Indian, Swedish, Filipino, German, and beyond - our different cultural influences and walks of life helped us even better understand the criticality of an inclusive point of view.
I've always wanted Sundial Brands to be an inspiration to other minority-owned companies of how a business against all odds can achieve excellence, have significant social impact in our communities, and be successful on a world stage.
While we have been presented several opportunities to be acquired by multinational corporations, we are most excited that our collaboration with Bain Capital fulfills our commitment to remain an independent family-owned and operated company with a purpose-driven business model that puts community at our core.
The ability to forget is a prerequisite for an entrepreneur.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
