Richelieu Dennis

“We need to be able to express ourselves and to show the world who we are and how we are.”

“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. In fact, we view ourselves as a mission with a business, rather than a business with a mission.”

“Our mission is to serve women of color and serve them deeply.”

“Once a company develops out of its consumer base, you will often see a well-funded multinational company come in and take over that space. The black-owned company either stays a niche company or just disappears. This is something we don't want to happen.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“We began Sundial Brands as young entrepreneurs, and as we move forward towards our goal of becoming the number one global family company serving our communities in a way that is aligned with their needs and our core values, we will always be entrepreneurs.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One of our missions has been to create an all-natural hair care line that caters to meet the unique needs of multi-ethnic consumers, which has traditionally been an underserved group in the mass market.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“This natural-hair movement has opened up the door for us to do so many things, for us to have conversations that we weren't able to have. We need this in our communities.”

“My whole life has been about building community, building business in our community, empowering people in our community.”