Business
Profile: Lisa Price – Founder of Carol’s Daughter
Lisa Price – Founder of Carol’s Daughter
Lisa Price’s started the beauty brand Carol’s Daughter by making mixtures in her own kitchen sink. Price named the company after her mother, Carol Price.
In the early 1990s, she was part of a television production team by day, and by night she was a one-woman product-concocting hobbyist-turned-entrepreneur. Actually, in Price’s case, it was more like nights and weekends.
In 1993, Price’s mother, convinced her to bring some of her handmade concoctions to a church flea market. Price spent about US$100 to cover the fees, labels and a US$25 lace tablecloth to make her display look a little more “homey,” she said.
The church flea market and several similar events garnered Price a small following. Then a cadre of customers started visiting Price’s Brooklyn apartment for holiday shopping events and populated the pages of Price’s customer contact list. Being the 1990s, Price was collecting postal addresses, not email accounts; and she kept her recipes in an ordinary notebook. In the early years, the company sold about US$5,000 to US$6,000 in products.
The brand soon expanded from lotions to hair oils, butters, conditioners and other products. Then Price added a catalogue, a retail store in Brooklyn and then online sales.
In 2002, the company was featured on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.” The daytime TV host and beauty product rainmaker declared herself a fan of the brand’s foot lotion. From there, sales skyrocketed. The line that Price had once managed in her spare time, from a spare bedroom, reached US$2.2 million in sales.
