In October 2014, L'Oréal USA announced the acquisition of Carol's Daughter, the Brooklyn-born natural hair and body care brand founded by Lisa Price in her kitchen in 1993. The acquisition -- whose terms were not publicly disclosed -- was the first time a major global beauty conglomerate had purchased a Black-founded natural hair brand, and it opened a conversation about ownership, identity, and scale that the industry is still having.
Price started Carol's Daughter by making products for herself and selling them at street fairs and church bazaars in Crown Heights. The brand grew through word of mouth, then through early e-commerce, then through celebrity endorsements from Jada Pinkett Smith, Jay-Z, and others who invested in the company. By the time L'Oréal came calling, Carol's Daughter was one of the most recognized brands in the natural hair space -- a category that the mainstream beauty industry had spent decades ignoring.
The response to the acquisition among Black consumers was immediate and divided. For many, Carol's Daughter had been a brand that felt like it belonged to them -- built by a Black woman, for Black women, before natural hair was a marketing category. The sale to a French multinational raised questions that were not purely financial: would the formulas change? Would the community focus shift? Would the brand that had grown because Black women trusted it continue to earn that trust?
“I named the company after my mother. She is still very much a part of what we do.”
-- Lisa Price, Founder, Carol's Daughter
L'Oréal kept Price involved and maintained the brand's natural positioning. In the years following the acquisition, Carol's Daughter expanded its retail presence significantly and introduced new product lines -- though not without occasional criticism that the brand had drifted from its roots.
What the Carol's Daughter acquisition did, above all, was demonstrate to the rest of the industry that Black-founded beauty brands had commercial value that the conglomerates had systematically failed to recognize. The acquisitions of Sundial Brands, Walker & Company, The Honey Pot, and Mielle Organics that followed in the years after were not coincidences. They were a pattern that the L'Oréal-Carol's Daughter deal helped make legible.
L'Oréal USA announced the sale of Carol's Daughter back to a founding partnership. Lisa Price returns as President -- eleven years after the original acquisition. The brand that started in a Crown Heights kitchen comes back to its founder.
