Lisa Price

Lisa Price was born on 18 May 1962 in Brooklyn, New York. In the early 1990s she was working as a writer's assistant on The Cosby Show while mixing fragrances and creams as a hobby in her Brooklyn kitchen, making products for her own dry skin and for friends and family.

In 1990 she began creating hair and body products from natural ingredients. In 1993, encouraged by her mother, Carol, she turned the pastime into a business and named it Carol's Daughter. She started with about $100, a card table and a flea market stall, then set up shop in her living room as word of mouth spread.

Price opened her first boutique in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 1999 and launched a mail-order website a year later, becoming one of the first to sell natural haircare recipes directly to customers online. In 2002 Oprah Winfrey featured the brand, and the website crashed from the rush of buyers. Celebrity investors followed, including Jay-Z, Will and Jada Pinkett Smith and Mary J. Blige.

In 2014 Carol's Daughter was acquired by L'Oréal USA, which brought the products to national retailers, and Price stayed with the brand as its founder. She was appointed to the National Women's Business Council during the Obama administration, and in a later chapter the brand moved to new ownership in a partnership in which she remains president.

Price has described building the company independently, experiencing an acquisition and then returning to a new chapter of ownership, and she says that Carol's Daughter is both a brand and who she is. Her story is widely cited as a model for how a founder can build a business around a community that mainstream beauty had overlooked.