Quotes from Richelieu Dennis

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's something about 'Essence' that we more than like - that we really love: the history of the community, the forward-thinking leadership.

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.

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.

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.

Our forward track must focus on including everyone, embracing everyone, and celebrating the beauty - and normalcy - of everyone's differences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm very focused on giving back, investing, and growing my community.

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 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.

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.