Price, Lisa

Impact on the world

Founded Carol's Daughter in 1993 with $100 worth of ingredients mixed in her Brooklyn kitchen, building it into one of the first African American-owned beauty brands with a national flagship retail presence, securing celebrity investors including Jay-Z, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith in 2005 and becoming the number one hair care brand on the Home Shopping Network by 2011; she sold the company to L'Oréal USA in 2014, then negotiated to reacquire it and return it to independent ownership in 2025.

Life & background

Born in Brooklyn, Price began mixing fragrances and creams as a hobby in her kitchen in 1990 while working in television production on 'The Cosby Show,' encouraged toward an actual business by her mother, Carol, after whom she named the company in 1993. She spent a decade running the operation from her own kitchen and stoop, with customers sometimes ringing her apartment doorbell at night for refills, before opening her first storefront in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood in 1999; a 2002 appearance on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' crashed her company's website with demand and propelled the brand to national recognition. In 2005, a group of celebrity investors including Jay-Z, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith contributed $10 million to fund national expansion, and by 2011 Carol's Daughter had become the top-selling hair care brand on the Home Shopping Network; despite this success, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2014 after a string of unprofitable retail stores, leading to its acquisition by L'Oréal USA that same year, a sale that drew public backlash from some customers who felt a beloved Black-owned brand had been lost. Price weathered renewed criticism along similar lines after the 2020 George Floyd protests intensified scrutiny of which 'Black-owned' beauty brands genuinely remained so, and in March 2025 she negotiated to reacquire Carol's Daughter from L'Oréal, returning the company to independent ownership with herself as president.

Sources

1. The HistoryMakers; Yale Center for Business and the Environment; The Helm; Face2Face Africa; BusinessWomen