Luster Products has been in business since 1957, and as of a report published September 30, 2026, every one of the founder’s five grandchildren works there.
Fred Luster Sr. started it. Nearly 70 years later the company is still owned by his family, and the pink lotion in the plastic bottle is still on the shelf.
Three of his children own it now. Jory Luster studied business and holds an MBA. Fred Luster II studied chemistry. Sonja Luster-Munic studied technology.
Read those three degrees again. Business, chemistry, technology. That is not a sentimental succession plan. That is a family that worked out the three things a hair care manufacturer actually needs and sent one child to learn each.
The third generation is already inside. Resa Luster-Mac, the founder’s granddaughter, is chief marketing officer.
“He believed you should always make a great product or provide a great service, and it should speak for itself,” she said of her grandfather.
She is also clear that what the company sells is not only lotion. “They buy people,” she said. “In our case, they need to buy into this family.”
And on what has kept it independent for most of seven decades: “We’re not relying on a general market party to tell us, ‘Oh, this is going to work on Black people.'”
That last sentence is the business case. When a brand sells, the judgment about what works on Black hair moves to somebody else’s lab and somebody else’s focus group. At Luster Products the people deciding what goes in the bottle are the people who use it, and they have been for three generations.
Black beauty brands usually reach us as startups, as raises, or as acquisitions waiting to happen. The coverage is about the exit.
This one is 69 years old, never took the exit, and handed itself down twice. Five grandchildren clocked in this morning. That is the rarer story, and it is by a long way the harder one to pull off.
