Lisa Price started Carol’s Daughter in her Brooklyn kitchen about 30 years ago, mixing products by hand and naming the company for her mother. In 2014 she sold it to L’Oreal. The price was never disclosed.
In 2025, she bought it back. She is now the brand’s founder and president, and she calls herself its forever founder.
“I never envisioned, when I sold it, that I could get it back,” she said. “And when it came back to me, I realized I didn’t have to be afraid.”
That is a sentence worth reading twice, because it is not about money. The fear she is describing is the one every founder who sells carries afterwards, which is that the thing you made is now somebody else’s to decide about.
She is not bitter about the decade in between. “It was an amazing 10 years to take the brand to levels that would have been so much harder independently,” she said of the L’Oreal period, and credited it with teaching her the science side of the work.
On the timing of the buyback, she was plain. “It was what was supposed to happen, but then the opportunity came where I could shift.”
When the deal closed, she wrote it out herself. “Today, I reclaim a new chapter and the indie spirit of my brand as its forever founder and newly appointed president,” she wrote. “This next chapter: it’s bolder. It’s fearless.”
Here is the context that makes this rarer than it reads. The natural hair category that large beauty companies now compete in was largely built by Black women who mixed product in kitchens, sold it at stalls and markets, and eventually sold the company. That is the normal ending. A founder reacquiring her own brand from a global conglomerate and installing herself as president is not the normal ending.
She bought back a company. She also bought back the right to decide what it becomes. Those are two different purchases, and she only had to make one of them.
