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June 3, 2020 44 mins

Born to freed slaves in 1867, Sarah Breedlove used her creativity, determination and brilliant mind for business to transform herself into the mogul, Madam C.J. Walker. Traveling the country with her hair products, Madam Walker employed legions of saleswomen to both grow her business and to give thousands of black women the skills and confidence to create generational wealth and follow in her footsteps.

Following Madam Walker’s empowering story we reflect on her legacy with The Lip Bar CEO and founder Melissa Butler who cites Madam C.J. Walker as part of her inspiration in founding a makeup line that would suit people of all skin tones.


Main Sources

  1. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker - by A'Lelia Perry Bundles (Now a Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, the book has been retitled ‘Self Made’)
  2. A New York Times article titled ‘Wealthiest Negro Woman’s Suburban Mansion’ published in November of 1917
  3. An Associated Press article on Madam C.J. Walker published in the spring of 1919

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Madam C. J. Walker wasn't invited to speak at the
National Negro Business League Convention in nineteen twelve, but it
wasn't because she didn't try. She begged the event organizers
and its creator, book Or T. Washington, over and over
again to give her a place on the stage. She
knew she deserved a place on that stage, and finally

(00:28):
she decided she wasn't going to take no for an answer,
So on the final day at the conference, she rose
from her seat in the audience and stared Booker T.
Washington right in the eye. Surely you are not going
to shut the door in my face. I feel that
I'm in a business that is a credit to the
womanhood of our race. I went into a business that

(00:49):
is despised, that is criticized, the business of growing hair.
They did not believe that such a thing could be done.
But I have proven, beyond a question of a doubt
that I do grow hair. I have been trying to
get before your business people and tell you what I'm doing.
Everybody told me that I was making a mistake by

(01:10):
going into this business. But I know how to grow
hair as well as I know how to grow kind.
Madam C. J. Walker had pulled herself up out of poverty.
She built a business empire that made her one of
the richest self made women in America at the turn
of the century. Married at fourteen to escape the treatment

(01:33):
of a cruel brother in law, mother at seventeen, and
then a millionaire by the time she died in fifty one.
And there was that amazing American rags to richest arc
of her story. That's a Lilia Bundle's Madam C. J.
Walker's great great granddaughter and biographer. On top of that

(01:54):
is a story of a woman who empowered other women.
She in the process created jobs for thousands of African
American women who otherwise would have been sharecroppers and washer
women and cooks and maids, and gave them the opportunity
to make their own money independently as business women. From

(02:24):
I Heart Radio and Tribeca Studios, this is fierce I
Can't Type Women. We're going to do a presenting problems,
a podcast about the incredible women who never made it
in your history books and the modern women carrying on
their legacies today. Us to the ladies, the Fair and
the Week. I can't find women. Workers don't mind routine

(02:45):
repetitive work. Will you make a copy of this? Naturally?
Each week we're bringing you the story of a groundbreaking
woman from the past who made huge contributions to the present,
but whose name still isn't on the tips of our
tongues for whatever reason, maybe it's because men wrote most
of history. At the end of each episode, I'll be

(03:07):
joined by a woman living today who's standing on the
shoulders of this historical figure, whether she knows it or not.
Madam C. J. Walker was born Sarah Breed Love to
freed slaves in eighteen sixty seven, two years after the

(03:29):
Civil War ended. They lived just across the river from Vicksburg, Mississippi,
in Delta, Louisiana. The Union army had destroyed most of
the area. Southern whites were exacting violence upon blacks randomly
and frequently, so Sarah Breed Love was born on the
same plantation where her parents, Owen and Minerva, had been enslaved,

(03:53):
and where her older siblings had been enslaved. Her parents
died when she was seven years old. She moved to
vic Burg, delivered their older sister, and began working as
a domestic servant. So now Sarah was left in the
care of her older sister, Luthenia, and Luthnia's husband named Powell,
who was really violent and really mean to her. By

(04:20):
the time she was fourteen years old, Sarah breedlove felt
her best move. Her only move was marriage. I'm married
at the age of fourteen in order to get a
home of my own. That's an actress reading Madam Walker's words.
The source for these quotes is her biography, written by A.
Liliah Bundle's. She married a man named Moses McWilliams, perhaps

(04:43):
out of love, perhaps in searcher stability, maybe both. Sarah's
only option in Vicksburg was to eke out a living
as a laundry lady for a dollar fifty a day.
Three years later, she gave birth to her daughter, Lilia.
Short after that, Sarah was widowed, married at fourteen, left

(05:04):
a widow at twenty with a little girl to support.
I've been over the washtub and looked at my arms,
beards and soap, says, and I said to myself, what
are you gonna do when you grow old and your
back gets stiff? Who is going to take care of
your little girl? Scraping by and with no better prospects,
she headed up the river to St. Louis in search
of a better future. If I've accomplished anything in life,

(05:28):
it's because I have been willing to work hard. In
eighteen eighty nine, St. Louis was a booming metropolis across
roads where east met west and north met south. It
beckoned with opportunity. Sarah Breedlove's brothers barbershop was a community hub.

(05:51):
Their barbershop is very near St. Paul. African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The Amy Church is well known for embracing the refugees,
the new people who were coming into the city, for
being politically active, for having an international outlook, and those
women of the church embraced Sarah Breetlove, the poor young

(06:13):
woman moving from rural Louisiana and rural Mississippi to the
big city with the daughter and trying to figure out
how in the world she's going to survive. Sarah's first
job was once again as a laundress, earning a mere
dollar a day. Her future and that of her five

(06:33):
year old daughter were always on her mind. Her brother
Alexander died, and her other brother, Owen, abandoned his wife
and moved into Mexico. In eight she married John Davis,
a man whose skills and opportunity were not enough for
her to step away from the laundry business, and who
ultimately turned out not only to be a drunk but

(06:56):
supporting a girlfriend on the side. John he was turned
out to be one of those situations where you realized
I can do bad by myself. So he just made
things worse, and so she needed to get him out
of her life. Sarah knew she didn't want to be
with another deadbeat. She started getting close to a new man,

(07:17):
Charles Joseph Walker, a more open minded guy who saw
her ambition and was there to support it. But Sarah
took things slow at first. She had been burned before
and she had more important things to focus on. In
the next decade, Sarah breed Love would transform herself from
washerwoman to the mogul Madam C. J. Walker, But first

(07:41):
a quick break. Sarah Breedlove's life had been marked by
term oil and stress. She was in her thirties coming

(08:03):
out of a harrowing and stressful marriage, and she started
to suffer from extreme hair loss. I tried everything mentioned
to me without any result. I was on the verge
of becoming entirely bald. I'm always really conscious of the
fact that a twenty first century audience has no concept

(08:26):
of what it was like to bathe and wash her
hair a hundred years ago. But the world was so different,
and she was going bald because most Americans didn't have
indoor plumbing. For them, a bath was maybe once a week,
because you had to go outside wherever you were living,

(08:47):
Pump the water in the well, put the water in
a bucket, pour that water into a bigger tub, heat
that water with wood that you had chopped or bought,
and then you would fill that water into what was
called a number two tin tub, which is about four
ft around, and that was once a week. And you

(09:10):
might not wash your hair at all during the winter
because you might feel like you were going to catch
a cold. So Sarah Brela was one of those women
for whom hygiene was a real challenge. And it wasn't
that you didn't care about hygiene, it was that there
were many steps to make this happen. And so as
a result of washing her hair infrequently, she had really

(09:31):
bad scalp infections. And while we can now, you know,
wash our hair with a dangerl shampoo, that really wasn't available,
so Sarah was struggling trying to figure out what she
was going to do. Sarah experimented with different formulas and
tonics until she found a solution, something that would not

(09:53):
only help her hair, but would change her entire life.
I prayed to the Lord for one night I had
a dream, and in that dream, a big black man
appeared to me and told me what to mix for
my hair. Some of the remedy was from Africa, but
I sent forward mixed to put it on my scalp,
and in a few weeks, my hair was coming in

(10:14):
faster than it had ever fallen out. I made up
my mind I would begin to sell it. Now. She
had a story sort of like her contemporaries, Helena Rubinstein
and Elizabeth Arden. And these were all women who created
great myths about their formulas. So now I will say

(10:38):
to you that I believe that as part of the truth,
I would not question whether Madam Walker had a dream
and a big African man appeared to her. Even Einstein
said that part of the theory of relativity came to
him in a dream. Sarah breed Love started to immerse
herself in the hair care world while she developed her

(10:58):
own products. She also landed a job working as a
sales agent for Annie turned boum Alone, one of the
first haircare entrepreneurs to make products for black women in America.
In fact, some historians will tell you that Annie turned
boum Alone was the creator of the business model that
Madam Walker would eventually employ. When Sarah eventually quit her

(11:19):
job with Annie to pursue her own business, there would
be a rift between the two women that would never
be mended. She was a charismatic genius about presenting and
marketing her products. But I also know that she had
the benefit of the brothers who were Barbers, of working

(11:41):
for a while as a sales agent for Annie Malone,
and of some of the other products that were already
on the market. Evoking both a blessing from God and
her African roots was the perfect origin story. But Sarah
Breedlove took it even further. She knew she had to
be inspirational. She had to convince her customers that they
deserved to feel and look beautiful. This idea of makeup

(12:05):
was a really new thing, and women caring too much
about their appearance was something that was considered a no
no and for African American women during an era when
the Gibson Girl was the standard of beauty. The Gibson Girl,
in case you're not familiar with that, was named for
these pen and ink drawings by the artist Charles Dana Gibson.

(12:28):
The artist described the Gibson Girl as a compositive thousands
of different American girls. What went on said was that
this didn't include American girls of African descent. Black women
like Madam Walker were really feeling the pressure to conform
to the European standards of beauty, and people were telling them,
you're ugly because your hair is kinky, and because your

(12:52):
skin is dark, and your nose is broad and your
lips are not thin, and so she was really combating
all of those things. The fact that she put her
own image on her products said that she was trying
to give Black women a message and to give them
a sense of themselves as women who were beautiful. Sarah

(13:20):
breed Love McWilliams Davis moved from St. Louis to Denver
in July nineteen o five. She was still selling products
for Annie Malone, but she was ready to strike out
on her own. She was intent on making enough money
on her own to send her daughter to college. She
had a sister in law in Denver, so it seemed
as good a place to go as any. She's in

(13:42):
that sort of classic transforming yourself, this very American way
of I'm moving to another city, I'm becoming a new person.
Denver had a really small black population, but she just
knew she needed to start over. I went to Denver, Colorado,
and began my business career, own a capital of one
dollar in I began, of course, in a most modest way.

(14:07):
I made house to house canvases among people of my race,
and after a while I got going pretty well. Sarah
found work as a cook at a boarding house. She
made thirty dollars a month that she was trying to
get her own business off the ground. She once told
a reporter that she spent most of her spare time
mixing up tub folds of her hair restorer potion. I

(14:29):
hired a little attic, which is my first laboratory. The
area around nineteenth and Arapaho Streets in Denver was a
bustling hub for African American businesses. There were several dozen
black owned shops and meeting halls, eight black churches, a
funeral home and three doctors, including the city's first black
woman doctor, Dr Justina Ford. Charles Joseph Walker or c J.

(14:54):
Was sweet on Sarah and he ended up following her
to Denver. He was a jack of many trades, the
kind of guy who could make a living anywhere. He
was sometimes described as a newsman, finding work selling ads
and subscriptions, among other odd jobs in the newspaper trade.
But the most important thing about Charles Walker was that

(15:15):
Sarah felt he shared her ambition towards personal betterment, and
she sees it and their ambition seems to be on
the same level. So at least for a while, this
seems to be a really good partnership, like they might
be able to make something of their loves. The couple
went about making a name for themselves in the city.

(15:38):
Sarah and c J. Were married in a quiet ceremony
in nineteen o six, even though she never technically divorced
John Davis, they didn't have a legal marriage license, but
Sarah breedlove took on the name Mrs Charles Joseph Walker,
the name that would eventually be transformed into Madam c. J. Walker.

(15:58):
She added that in Adam Onto the front of her name,
Madam C. J. Walker, And it was admittedly a bit
of an affectation because Madam was the French name, and
that's what France. Paris was, the center of fashion, in
the center of cosmetics, the center of beauty, and she

(16:21):
was inserting that onto her identity. If you look in
old newspapers, you would see women who owned boarding houses,
or women who were seamstresses, or who were caterers might
call themselves Madam Jones, Madam Smith. And of course there
were women who ran illegal businesses who were called Madam's,
but it really was a nomenclature for women who owned businesses.

(16:44):
And so while Madam continued peddling her tonics, Charles Joseph
made a name for himself, establishing a real estate loan
and rental company and throwing lavish parties to attract new customers.
The couple's two businesses were remarkably symbiotic, because any well
dressed and well clothed woman at the event told the

(17:05):
press that their gorgeous hair was the result of Madam's tonics.
Madam Walker pounded the pavement. She traveled through Colorado's front range,
armed with a large supply of Madam Walker's Wonderful hair Grower,
offering the product as well as classes in its application.
She attended receptions and parties and became well known for

(17:28):
offering a pampering experience to her clients. She became so
successful that she finally quit working for Annie Turnbaum alone.
Her Denver salon soon opened to a great stream of customers,
and her daughter Lelia made the journey west to take
over its management. Meanwhile, Madam Walker and c. J made

(17:49):
preparations to grow a mail order business. Denver proved to
be a small market for Madam Walker, and her attention
began to evolve back eastward. She leaves Colorado after about
a year because she knows that she can only expand
her market so much, so she and Charles Joseph Walker

(18:09):
begin to travel throughout Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas where there are
black people, and then they make their way through the
southern United States towards the east coast. By the time
Madam Walker hit the road from Denver, her monthly earnings
were hitting three dollars, a fortune by anyone's standards. At
the time, white male shopkeepers barely made a third of

(18:31):
what Madam Walker was pulling in Madam, with help from
c J, launched what amounted to a large scale grassroots
marketing campaign from town to town across the South. They'd
contact Baptist and African American Methodist churches, secure local lodging,
make connections with local fraternal organizations, and put together demonstrations.

(18:51):
They hold a class or two to recruit salespeople and
then let the orders stream in rince and repeat as
business surged. Walker built a distribution center in Pittsburgh. It
was a strategic location because goods could be efficiently shipped
to most of the country. In Pittsburgh, Walker established another salon.

(19:15):
She looked for endorsements from the city's black leadership. Pretty
soon she managed to get leaders from the church in
other community groups to sign a petition on her behalf.
We the undersigned, highly recommend Madam C. J. Walker's work
and worth as a hairgrower. She has no equal. We
found her to be a strictly honest, thoroughgoing businesswoman. Until
her advent into this city, we did not believe in

(19:36):
such a thing as a hair grower. Her efforts prevailed
with nineteen o eight receipts nearly twice those of nineteen
o seven and then up again in nineteen o nine
to over eight thousand, seven hundred dollars or a hundred
and fifty grand by today's standards. She began to present
herself more formally, appearing in photographs in a manner that
quote reflected her increased income and newly acquired status. She

(20:00):
used what's really of still very effective way of advertising
with them before and after pictures. So the before picture
was Madam Walker with very short hair, and on either
side what kind of a trip tick? Was a front
view in a side view of Madam Walker with really long, bushy, healthy,
full hair. By this time, her company was getting huge.

(20:24):
Adam Walker had thousands of customers and employed around nine
fifty agents who were selling her product for her. I
have made it possible for many colored women to abandon
the washtub for more pleasant and profitable occupation. As she
goes from city to city, she begins to understand what
are the needs of these women. They need hair care,

(20:45):
but they also need education, and they need economic independence.
One woman wrote to her, before I started using Madam
Walker's wonderful hair grower, my hair was an eighth of
an inch long, and now my hair is down my
back and I have been able to throw my wig away,
but there were just as many women writing to her
saying thank you for helping me make a living for

(21:08):
my family. Another woman said, you have made it possible
for a black woman to make more money in a
day selling your products as a sales agent than she
could in a month working in somebody's kitchen. By nineteen ten,
Madam Walker was looking to build a more permanent headquarters
and factory in Indianapolis. There was a real black business

(21:30):
leadership in that town, with three black newspapers and some
political agency, and that was where she saw an opportunity
and began to really make money. She became friends with
George Knox, who was the publisher of the Indianapolis Freeman.
He had been formally enslaved person who owned for a

(21:51):
while the barbershop at the Bates Hotel right next to
the Indiana State Legislature, so he had become very involved
in politics. He was very much a leader of that
first generation out of slavery. She made an alliance with him,
and soon after she arrived there was a big fundraising
campaign for a black y m c A. That participation

(22:14):
in the fundraising campaign when she gave a thousand dollars
raised her national profile. Now people were reading about her
not just because of her hair care products, but the
stunning thousand dollar gift from a black woman. She was
somebody who people wanted to emulate. She bought a house
in town and found a way to make it make

(22:35):
money for her by taking in borders. It was also
a way to help out black travelers, since many hotels
still wouldn't rent rooms to African Americans passing through town.
Madam Walker was never not hustling, She diversified. I'm preparing
myself so when this hair business falls to the ground,
I will have an income and I won't have to

(22:58):
come down. She bought smith real estate in Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Gary, Indiana,
and New York City, and as always, she saw endorsements
from local and national leaders who could bolster her reputation.
But there was one endorsement Madam Walker both wanted and needed,
and it was the most difficult one to get. Booker T. Washington,

(23:21):
the country's most storied and celebrated advocate for black entrepreneurs.
Madam Walker wrote to him over and over again. He
was always polite in his response, but reserved and wary
of setting a meeting with her. She kept visiting his
conferences and even tried charming the women in his family
with complimentary hair treatments, but it was impossible to infiltrate

(23:44):
his inner circle. She sent him a letter asking him
to invest in her business, and he replied that he
really wasn't interested. And then she sent a letter asking
to attend one of his conferences on Tuskegees campus, and
he basically told her don't come. And she showed up
anyway with a letter of endorsement from the head of
the y m c A in Indianapolis, and his chief

(24:07):
of staff told her she really wasn't welcome, but he
made an accommodation and let her speak at church at
Chapel and at the actual convention. By Madam Walker had
had enough. That's when she took to the stage at
the National Negro Business League convention in Chicago. You heard
that speech in the beginning of the episode. I built

(24:28):
my own factory on my own ground thirty eight by
eight feet. I owned my own automobile and run about.
My object in life is not simply making money for
myself or to spend it on myself, and dressing a
running around in an automobile. I love to use a
part of what I make in trying to help others.
She was so forceful and so rousing. All of a sudden,

(24:51):
I think she's viral. It's kind of where we would
see what she had done. As Madam walker Star continued
to rise, her five year marriage to c J deteriorated.
Madam wanted more, but c J he was content, maybe
even complacent. When we began to make ten dollars a day.

(25:14):
He thought that amount was enough and I should be satisfied.
When we found it impossible to agree due to his
narrowness of vision, I embarked in business for myself. When
they started out, it was as if he understood that
this was a woman with ambition and he was ready
for that. But he was only ready for it up

(25:35):
to a certain point, and she started moving beyond him.
There's this one story. They might be fiction or partly fiction.
She seems to have come upon him in a hotel
room with another woman, and as the story goes, women
carried pistols because you were a women traveling alone. That

(25:56):
she was outside that hotel room and she knew he
was inside with somebody else, and she had her hand
on the pistol, and her life must to flash before her,
and she realized, what do I care about this guy?
I need to get on with what I'm doing. It
is really hard to be as driven as she was,
and that sometimes success in business means that you are

(26:22):
neglecting the people who mean the most to you and
who you love the most. After that, Madam Walker left
the breakup of her marriage to her lawyers, and she
took off for a trip up and down the West
Coast to expand her business there. She wrote to her
lawyers about that trip. I'm sure this trip is going
to add at least two or three thousand per month

(26:42):
to my income. I'm succeeding in making agents everywhere I go.
Madam Walker felt she would quickly outgrow Indianapolis, and she
already had property in New York, a spectacular Harlem town
house with a well equipped beauty parlor right on the
ground floor. He was again time to move, this time

(27:03):
up to the Big Apple. The Indianapolis Freeman mourned the
city's loss on the front page of the newspaper. The
citizens of Indianapolis, without regard to race, are one in
their expressions of regret at the loss of Madam C. J. Walker.
As a resident of the city of Indianapolis, Harlem is
kind of a mecca, kind of a fantasy land for

(27:26):
African Americans. There's no other city in America where black
people have access to such a neighborhood with these beautiful brownstones,
beautiful apartment buildings. So first the house on a hundred
thirties sixth Street is a fabulous house. And then within
a couple of years she realizes that they really need

(27:48):
to expand, so she buys the house next door, and
they redesigned it into this double town house. It looks like,
you know, with a beautiful brick and glass, French doors
and limes done facade. That looks more like a house
on the East side of New York with the beauty
salon on the first floor and they're living quarters upstairs

(28:09):
and the beauty school in the basement. By nineteen eighteen,
Madam Walker reported annual earnings of more than two hundred
and seventy four thousand dollars that's the equivalent of three
million today. She was on track to make even more
the following year. She began taking regular trips north to
check on the progress of a two hundred and fifty

(28:31):
thousand dollar, thirty four room villa that she was having
built in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in America. I
want plenty of room in which to entertain my friends.
I've worked so hard all my life. I would like
to rest. According to The New York Times, there was
a collective gasp of astonishment from the community when they

(28:52):
learned that she did, indeed and tend to live there. Impossible,
they exclaimed, quote no woman of her race could have
four in such a place. Well that fall, the Times
published another story about Madam C. J. Walker's house. That's
when the newspaper provided Madam Walker's assets at a cool
million or nearly That nineteen proved difficult for Madam Walker's health.

(29:19):
Her kidneys began to fail her, and her doctors insisted
she began to slow down. Knowing her mother wouldn't stop,
her daughter Lelia begged her doctors to keep, asking her
to rest. On Good Friday, Madam Walker finally confided to
a friend that she knew she didn't have much longer.
My desire now is to do more than ever for

(29:39):
my race. I would love to live for them. On Sunday,
Madam Walker passed away in her bed. Her death made
headlines around the world Over time. I have really come

(30:04):
to think of Madam Walker's story is a story of
empowerment for other women. It was women's economic independence. It
was women having confidence in themselves and then being able
in many ways to create generational wealth. I still meet
people who show me diplomas of their great aunt, great grandmother,
grandmother who graduated from the Walker Beauty School and who

(30:28):
did hair at home, who was able to work at home,
who could pay tuition, could buy real estate, could go
into another business. The Walker Beauty Schools where these academies
created by Madam Walker and her daughter to teach beauty
culture and to train sales agents. But they had another function.
Madam Walker helped inspire women in the academies to do

(30:50):
community service and to take on leadership roles. In nineteen seventeen,
she had her first convention of her sales agents. She
said to THEO, but I want you to understand that
your first duty is to humanity. At the end of
the convention, the women sent a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson,
urging him to support legislation to make lynching a federal crime,

(31:11):
and this idea of women being politically engaged carried through
almost to the present time, so that black women beauticians
during the Civil Rights Movement were able to have meetings
in their salons because they owned them, and that those
women in the National Beauty Culturist League helped finance the
buses that brought people to the March on Washington in

(31:32):
nineteen sixty three. I had to make my own living
and my own opportunity, but I made it. Don't sit
down and wait for opportunities to come, get up and
make them. Time for a quick break. When we come back,
I'll be speaking to entrepreneur Melissa Butler. Miss Butler was

(31:55):
directly inspired by Madam C. J. Walker's story when she
launched her own beauty business. Madam C. J. Walker may
have been one of the first black women millionaires in
this country, but her true brilliance had nothing to do

(32:16):
with money. C J. Walker's legacy of entrepreneurship and mentorship
has empowered generations of black women to follow her lead.
Melissa Butler started teaching herself how to make lipstick in
her Brooklyn kitchen in after a lucrative career on Wall
Street failed to inspire her passions, Melissa set out on
her own. She'd noticed a lack of affordable options for

(32:39):
lipstick that suited women of all skin tones. That's when
she decided to launch The lip Bar. Eight years later,
Melissa moved the business to her hometown of Detroit. That's
where the lip Bar has grown to feature a whole
line of vegan and cruelty free makeup that's available in
stores around the country. I spoke to Melissa about the
ways Madam C. J. Walker has inspired her as a
business woman and as a role model. Welcome to Fierce.

(33:03):
Thank you for having me. What did you know about C. J.
Walker when you were growing up. I have always been
a history buff, especially a Black history buff, because I've
always known since I was a kid that a lot
of our Black history wasn't taught to us in school
in some instances very intentionally, and so I really latched

(33:26):
onto those black stories where I felt like I could
see myself. So I was a big fan of Malcolm
X and Madam C. Jay Walker. Hearing stories of her
being the first woman self made millionaire, it was like,
who wouldn't be inspired by that. You know how people
celebrate Martin Luther King like I absolutely celebrated in Madame C. J. Walker.

(33:49):
What did you actually want to be when you were
a child. I didn't want to be an entrepreneur. I
don't think that I knew that I could be an
entrepreneur until I was in high school and I was
working at my cousin's clothing store, and my cousin will
allow me to count the register and he taught me
all about margins. And so when I went to college,

(34:09):
I just went for business business in general, and then
I adopted business finance because at that point I still
didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew
that I wanted to make money. And I was like, huh,
people on Wall Street make a lot of money, they say,
And that's basically where I started my career. How long
were on Wall Street? And when did you realize that

(34:30):
maybe Wall Street wasn't for you? I worked on Wall
Street for four years. After the first year, I knew
that it wasn't for me, and you decided to start
your own company in you know, I was not a
concidantic chemist. I did not come from money. I grew
up on the east side of Detroit, and I started

(34:51):
this company because I really wanted to create non toxic,
vegan and cruelty free products that will look good on
every single skin tone. And that's what I set out
to do. Tell me a little bit about the early
days of lip Bar, how you bootstrapped it, how you
got it off the ground. I saved all of my money.
It was sacrifice, but also it was determination. It was

(35:11):
sheer determination. I remember, you know, getting home from work
at like seven or eight o'clock and then staying up
until three and working. I don't remember being tired in
this period, although I probably didn't really get a good
sleep for a solid seven months. I didn't know how
to make lipstick, but I learned because with every single batch,

(35:34):
I got a little bit better. And I think that
that is a lesson for entrepreneurs in general. No matter
what skill you are, no matter if you're aspiring or
have an idea, or whether you're scaling a multimillion dollar business,
you always have to be in this place of trying
to get a little bit better than you were the
day before. So you decided to go on Shark Tank

(35:56):
to try to grow the business. What happened there. We
were already in business for a couple of years when
we went on Shark Tank. We were on Forever twenty
one dot com, we were doing trunk shows, so we
we had a viable business with a lot of upside
at that point, and so we went on Shark Tank.
They didn't give us a deal. They thought that the

(36:17):
colors were two bold, they said a couple of cruel things.
But it literally didn't matter to us, Like we were
in business before Shark Tank. I knew that we would
be in business after Shark Tank, So it was just
something that happens. And again, as an entrepreneur, you need
to know that you're gonna experience rejection and failure and

(36:38):
you're gonna be told no so many times. But if
you're grounded in your purpose, then it doesn't matter. You
just find different doors to go through and you build
new doors and you build new tables. What barriers do
you feel that you faced as a woman and or
as a woman of color? There are tons of barriers
as a woman, as a black woman. And I remember

(37:00):
when we were first launching in target stores, we needed
money because at that point we had just been moot
strapping the company, which means that essentially every dollar that
we made we put back into the company. We weren't
even paying ourselves salary, me and Roscoe, who's my partner
and creative director. But we now needed money because we
have this huge opportunity with Target to go on stores.

(37:24):
We need inventory for all those stores that were going
into And I started pitching to investors because you know,
you need money. You need money for marketing, you need
money for the inventory. And people would say, Oh, there's
such an impressive entrepreneur, but you know this isn't gonna work.
And when you look at especially like white men who

(37:46):
are able to get funded off of an idea, not
necessarily traction, Like I have a purchase order from a
national retailer and could not get funding to further fuel
this business. And that was crazy to me. And so
when I would tell the story, people would say, like,
what wit, You have a purchase order worth Target and
you couldn't get money. And so eventually we did get

(38:07):
money to fund it, but I probably pitched one hundred
angel investors, slash venture capitalists and funds to get that money.
So funding is a challenge. They say that black women
are starting businesses at the fastest rate in the country,
but are only getting one percent of the venture capital money.

(38:29):
So there is a huge gap and our ability to
monetize a lot of the things that we are creating culturally,
and then even the fact that I'm selling makeup and
makeup can work for every single complexion, but especially I
make sure that it will work for women of color
because we need those deeper pigments that a lot of

(38:53):
the beauty industry had never really thought about. So the
products that we produce work on everyone from and Hathaway
to Lupeta, for instance. But if you see branding of
the lip bar where it's a black woman and a
white woman, somebody might still come up and say, oh,
is this only for a black woman? And so that's
a challenge because as a black woman, even customers are

(39:16):
everyday people will say like, oh, I shouldn't buy that
because there's a black woman on the advertising, whereas black
people will oftentimes by a product no matter who is
on the add So there have been tons of challenges,
but I will say that this is the most fulfilling
thing I've ever done. One of the things that we
love about C. J. Walker story is how she used

(39:38):
her business two uplift other women, and I feel like
you've also been trying to pay it forward with everything
you're doing with lip Bar. Talk to me a little
bit about that, Madam C. J. Walker. She is the blueprint.
She built an empire, and then she used the empire
to employ other women to give back to educate. So

(40:00):
obviously we're doing that on a much smaller scale. But again,
we're really proud that all of our teams, all women,
were really proud that we are able to teach people,
especially in the metro Detroit area, a new skill set
that hasn't typically existed. So finding talent is difficult in
a city like Detroit because it is a blue collar city,

(40:22):
and so I knew that coming home, I knew that
it would be a challenge. I knew that I would
have to build a team from the ground up, and
that's essentially what I've done. So I have taught people
new skill sets. I have given people the ability to
go into a new industry that wouldn't necessarily be available

(40:44):
to them. I mentor a ton of small business owners
like people ask me questions on Instagram all day long,
and if I have a few moments I'll tell them
things that I found to be really beneficial for me
because when I started, I didn't oh what the heck
I was doing. And this is something that is very
particular and specific to women. We don't oftentimes get the

(41:07):
chance to make a mistake. It's like you need to
get it right on the first time. And so I
am always happy to take the opportunity to help a
small business owner who was where I was seven years
ago when I started the company. Where's the company now?
What does your success look like? Right in this moment,
the lip bar is growing a ton. We did a

(41:27):
massive expansion in October twenty nineteen, so we are now
not only lips. So we're really proud about that. We're
solving this problem of non toxic makeup, We're solving the
problem of inclusivity and diversity within the beauty landscape. And
we're really just looking to continue to solve our customers problems.

(41:50):
And so we're doing that through our assortment, through our imagery,
and honestly by telling the stories of our customers, which
is very similar to Madam C. J. Walker, And so
we're proud to walk in her footsteps and have her
as that blueprint or primed for success. So I think
Madam C. J. Walker would be proud of us. I

(42:11):
think she would be What is your advice for the
next generation of young women who want to be entrepreneurs,
who want to stand on your shoulders? Number One, you
have to get rid of the fear. You have to
get rid of the fear of failure. You have to
get rid of the fear of everybody's doing it. No
one can do it quite like you, So get rid
of that fear. And more importantly, you can't do any

(42:33):
of those things that I've just listed without believing in yourself.
So the model of the lip Bar is you know,
on our door and our Detroit store, it says the
lip Bar where you are enough. So you have to
know that you are enough that you can and should
be the person to actively pursue your dreams because no

(42:55):
one's gonna do it, but you, so have confidence in
yourself and be open to what the universe has to
offer you. We're very grateful to our guests biographer and
great great granddaughter of Madame C. J. Walker, Alelia Bundles,
and entrepreneur and CEO of the lip Bar, Melissa Butler.

(43:17):
Madam C. J. Walker is voiced by Iris Little Thomas.
Additional voices in this episode done by Patrice Drew and
Taj Songa. Fierce is hosted and written by Joe Piazza,
produced and directed by me Anna Stump. Our executive producers
are Joe Piazza, Nikkiator, Anna Stump, and from Tribeca Studios,
Leah Sarbib. This episode was edited by Jacopo Penzo and

(43:38):
soundscaped by Yacopo Penzo and Anna Stump. Our associate producer
is Emily Marinoff. Fact checking by Austin Thompson. Research by
Nick Astor. The Fierce theme is by Hamilton Lighthouser and
Anna Stump. Additional music for this episode by Blue Dots.
Sessions are very sincere. Thanks to Manguesh had ticket Or
for making this series possible and to Nikki etre Are,
co executive producer. Thank you so very much for everything

(44:01):
you've done for this show. Sources for this episode on
her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madam C. J.
Walker by Alelia Perry Bundles now a Netflix series starring
Octavia Spencer. The book has been retitled Self Made. A
New York Times article on Madam c. J. Walker published
in November of nineteen seventeen. An Associated Press article on

(44:22):
Madam C. J. Walker published in the spring of Thanks
so much for listening. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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