By Lottie L. Joiner, Special for USA TODAY
As a child, Lisa Price loved fragrances. She found a way to create her own, blending different perfume oils. Over the years Price created oils and creams in her home as a hobby. In 1993 her mother, Carol, suggested she sell her body creams at a church flea market. They nearly sold out.
"I invested about $100 in that flea market, and I made my money back and then some," she says.
And that's how Carol's Daughter was born.
Price spent that summer at craft fairs, street festivals and flea markets selling her handmade concoctions. As more people bought her products, she knew she could turn her passion into profit.
"I knew pretty early on that people loved my product and wanted it," Price says. "As long as I could manage where I sold it and how I sold it, I could manage my costs and I could make money doing it."
Though Price, 49, was able to turn her hobby into a profitable business, Tory Johnson, a network commentator and founder of Spark & Hustle (sparkandhustle.com), which provides conferences for small businesses, says that one of the biggest mistakes that people make is treating their new business like their old hobby.
"A hobby is not generally responsible for paying your mortgage, maintaining your lifestyle. That's what a business is for. So you have to shift from thinking about this as a hobby, which is something I do simply when I feel like doing it, to thinking of it as a business," Johnson says. Kimberly Seals-Allers, author of The Mocha Manual to Turning Your Passion into Profit, agrees, noting that not every hobby is a business.
"There is a disillusionment about entrepreneurship," Seals-Allers says. "People think it's easy, that they're going to be at home or they'll have more time. You will work harder than you've ever worked in your life."
For the first six years of her business, Price ran Carol's Daughter out of her home. She juggled her job in film and television production with the demands of entrepreneurship: mixing things, pouring things, labeling and unpacking boxes. It was a challenge, she says, balancing the expenses, managing payroll and controlling expectations. So she decided to hire an accountant on a consulting basis. Things got better.
"That was a great thing for me … because it freed up my time that I was spending doing something that I really didn't know how to do, and it allowed me to focus on other areas of the business so that I could grow the business," Price says.
Seals-Allers says it's really important to have an honest assessment of skills to determine what type of business best suits your personality. "You have to really know your strengths and weaknesses. If not, your business suffers," she says.
When Price opened her first store in 1999, the business had $1.7 million in sales. Five years later, she took on an equity partner. The decision helped her expand. Today her investors include marketing mastermind Steve Stoute, hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and movie star Will Smith.
Johnson of Spark & Hustle notes how critical it is to align with people who can either help you or do things for you. She says that one of the biggest challenges aspiring entrepreneurs face is just understanding the process around launching a successful business based on your passion or hobby.
"Getting nine stores and being in places like Dillard's and Macy's and selling on Home Shopping Network would not have been doable by myself. I just would not have been able to borrow enough money to do that," Price says. "I knew that I had done on my own everything I could to grow my business and that I had taken it pretty much as far as I could."
Price's handmade body oils and creams were popular among her customers, but she noticed an increasing demand for hair products. It was the early '90s and African-American women with natural hair yearned for products that addressed their hair care needs. Price filled that void.
Today Carol's Daughter is known as much for its hair care products as its body oils and creams. The competition from major brands hasn't deterred her passion — or sales. She still feels strongly about her product, which has grown to 85 different items, including products for hair, skin and body. Carol's Daughter has nine retail stores, and can be found in Dillard's, Macy's and Sephora. In 2009, she opened the Back Room Hand & Foot Spa at her flagship store in Harlem. Customers can get manicures and pedicures with Carol's Daughter products. And last year, the company launched its first celebrity fragrance, My Life, with R&B singer Mary J. Blige on the Home Shopping Network. It sold more than 60,000 bottles in less than six hours.
As her company continues to grow, Price, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and three children, is working just as hard as she did in the beginning. But it's a different kind of work, she notes.
And even though Carol's Daughter has had a slew of celebrity spokesmodels, including actress Jada Pinkett Smith, singer Solange Knowles and model Selita Ebanks, Price continues to be the chief spokesperson for her product.
"You have to sell yourself to keep yourself going. If you can't sell you, then how are you going to sell anybody else?" Price says.
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