How I Built This: Carol's Daughter: Lisa Price
Lisa Price started out making skincare products, putting them into baby food jars and selling them to friends at church. (0:30)
Lisa used the "skeleton" of a recipe from a book to get started. Then she added her own combinations and tweaks. (7:04)
She didn't do anything she couldn’t afford to do- "If someone told me about an expo and the fee to get in is $5000 - I wasn’t going there. But a table in Park Slope for $35? Ok!” (11:06)
People would call and say hey I’m running out of cream. How do I get some more? I’d tell them to come by my apartment- that was the beginning of people coming and shopping at my apartment. (14:40)
Carol's Daughter spread by word of mouth: “It spread by grassroots. One woman told another woman. Someone always brought a friend - it grew that way.” (15:41)
Lisa and her husband worked in the tv production industry. They would sell the creams to makeup artists and hairstylists - When the makeup artists and hairstylists would move on to another production, people on the new show would see the products and eventually place orders. (21:17)
To open up their first store she borrowed money from her kid’s college fund. (23:35)
Oprah featured Carol's Daughter products on her show: The Oprah effect: the website went from 37 people to 17,000 people within 4 minutes of the segment aired. (28:00)
Lisa never could have predicted the success of Carol's Daughter: To this day I’m still amazed. It’s surreal. Feeling that way keeps me grounded and focused on the work I do. Whether we did 42k sales/ year or $28 million in sales/ year - I’m still doing the same work. (30:41)
In 2014 L’Oréal bought Carol’s Daughter. (33:18)