Black History Month Blog: Lisa Price
By Larry Mullins, 1010 WINS
To walk into Lisa Price's office, you'd first of all think that you were walking into your momma's kitchen. This lady had pots and pans and seasoning salts and oils all over the place. I thought she was about to cook us a nice little meal… (after all, it was the mid-day..and my producer Sharon Barnes-Waters and I were a little hungry).
NOT! She was cooking alright: cooking up the next product that'll most likely be on the shelf at one of her stores. Lisa is the founder and CEO of Carol's Daughter… which (and I'm a guy so I didn't know) is apparently one of the hottest product lines out there, for women of all colors.
They make things like Shea Butter Skin Smoothie…Lemon and Rose Hand Cream…Mango Body butter etc. It sounds like something you'd order as a "post-workout" shake at a health bar. But she takes these ingredients right out of her kitchen, mixes them up, and voilla! Two years later, they show up on the shelf, at one of her nine stores!
I offered to make a nice "Collard greens with peanut butter and jelly foot salve." She didn't buy it. Her loss. But she is coming up with a men's line in 2013. (If anything remotely resembling my invention shows up in a bottle, I'm going after naming rights!).
But the people in her lower Manhattan office (not too far from our studio's in the West Village near the Holland Tunnel) were just fabulous—all of them young people with specialties in marketing and branding. I thought I saw a wife (Hey..I'm a single guy…I'm lookin' okay??!!). But I couldn't get up my nerve. But anyway, the one thing you notice about this place is that EVERYBODY is down with the product: They LOVE this place and they LOVE the fragrances and creams that they're putting out!
And apparently, their customers and the cosmetics and business industry does too. Sister Price has been awarded everything from Black Enterprises Woman of the year to Working Woman Magazines Entrepreneur of the year.
Heck, we were even impressed with the bathrooms: Lisa had a lot of her products on the counters in the restrooms for visitors to USE (That's capitalized for Sharon, whom I thought I saw with a sampler in her pocket after we left).
And to think, Ms. Price started this business with $100 bucks! She used to be an executive assistant with the Cosby Show, which taped here in New York. And when the show ended in '92...she went soul searching, created some products that people really liked…and the rest is history. Now her company sells millions of products, named after her mom (thus Carol's Daughter). As the story goes, they were brainstorming on a name…and her mom's name, her dad's name (Robert's Daughter) and her then boyfriend (Gordon's girlfriend) all came up as possible brand names.
Mom won out on the name…but that old slick Gordon got something even better: Lisa. They got married and he's now her business partner. …with three kids living in Brooklyn.
And I'm left with my recipe, for Collard greens, peanut butter and jelly foot salve., LISA PRICEecipe, for Collard greens, peanut butter and jelly foot salve.
