Annie Turnbo Malone.
Madam C. J.Walker, circa 1914.
Demand quickly outstripped the two sisters’ ability to produce the hair grower, and Turnbo hired three young women as assistants. Urged by friends to expand the business, in 1902 she moved across the Mississippi to St. Louis, drawn by its vibrant black community, a robust drug and toiletries trade, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, then being planned. Once well established in St. Louis, Turnbo began to extend her market, first throughout the South, then nationally. In 1906, as competitors began to imitate her product, she proudly registered the trade name “Poro,” a Mende (West African) term for a devotional society. When she married Aaron Malone in 1914, Annie Turnbo Malone's Poro was a thriving enterprise.
Sarah Breedlove, or Madam C. J. Walker as she became known, also entered the hair-care business in these years. Her early life bore some similarities to Malone's, her chief rival. Born to former slaves in Delta, Louisiana, in 1867, she was orphaned as a child and moved in with her older sister. In 1882, at age fourteen, she married laborer Moses McWilliams. Over the next few years, she gave birth to her daughter Lelia, then her husband died in an accident. Moving to St. Louis in 1888, Sarah did housework and laundering, raised her daughter, and joined the African Methodist Episcopal church and several charitable societies. She also briefly became a Poro agent.9
When her hair began to thin and fall out, Sarah experimented with formulas containing sulphur, capsicum, and other stimulants, and began to sell her own remedy. She too called her product Wonderful Hair Grower, which may have been one of the reasons Malone registered the Poro trade name. Although each woman claimed to have invented haircare systems for African Americans, they probably modified existing formulas and improved heating combs already on the market, adjusting them for the condition and texture of black women's hair. Their technique for pressing hair, using a light oil and wide-tooth steel comb heated on a stove, put much less strain on the scalp than earlier methods using round tongs or “pullers.” By straightening each strand, this “hot comb” process created the desired look of long, styled hair.10
McWilliams moved to Denver in 1905 and began to sell in earnest. “I made house-to-house canvasses among people of my race,” she recalled, “and after awhile I got going pretty well.” She married newspaperman Charles J. Walker, who helped her start an advertising campaign and mail-order business. Over the next few years, Madam Walker extended her business to the South and Midwest and in 1910 settled the company in Indianapolis, which she considered a favorable spot both for African Americans and for national distribution. Although she incorporated the company in 1911, the major decisions and the profits remained in her own hands.11
In another period, Arden, Rubinstein, Malone, and Walker might have lived and labored in obscurity, a fate shared by most women. At the turn of the century, however, women's need for employment in a growing commercial and service economy joined with new cultural perceptions about appearance making and self-display, to foster women's enterprises in beauty culture. Finding ways to overcome the economic barriers and social impediments women faced, these four shrewdly took the measure of their times—and the market—to build business empires.
Like those who started other consumer-oriented businesses, beauty entrepreneurs grappled with common problems of ensuring distribution, creating brand recognition, and increasing demand. Sex discrimination intensified the host of challenges they faced. Women had less access than men to credit and education in business methods. They were generally barred from professional training in pharmacy, which was necessary to run drugstores and was the path men usually took into toiletries manufacturing. These obstacles had profound consequences for women's businesses. Although information about these early enterprises is limited, most remained small-scale affairs: a one-woman manufacturing operation based in a kitchen or a sideline to salon services, requiring little capital investment.12
In some of the larger companies, women controlled promotion and marketing as the firm's public face, but husbands or brothers held key positions in finance and manufacturing, where they oversaw both money and workers. When Elizabeth Arden expanded from salon services to product sales in 1918, she attended largely to her exclusive salons while her husband supervised production and distribution of the cosmetics line. In other cases, men played lesser or adversarial roles. Although Charles Walker initially helped his wife establish her hairgrower business, it was Madam Walker who ambitiously expanded the enterprise into the national market. Women often struggled with husbands or relatives for control of their companies. The marriages of Walker and Malone ended in divorce over business conflicts; Harriet Hubbard Ayer's ex-husband and daughter charged her with mismanagement, committed her to an asylum, and assumed control of the company. The Woman's Cooperative Toilet Company found it necessary to explain to a prospective sales agent in 1891, “We are not men doing business under assumed ladies’ names,” and derided this “mania of our men imitators.”13
Gaining access to distribution networks and retail outlets especially plagued women entrepreneurs. Competition for shelf space in department stores favored the more prestigious male perfumers, considered skilled craftsmen. Druggists relied on large wholesale supply companies, which tended to carry established brands and hired men as traveling sales agents. African-American entrepreneurs faced these problems and more. With few black-owned groceries, general stores, and pharmacies, they needed to convince white retailers to stock their products. The success of cosmetics manufacturer Anthony Overton was unusual. Overton remembered calling on the trade for the first time—“several white merchants refused to even look at our samples”—but with enormous persistence he eventually broke through the color line in drug and variety stores. Only after Malone and Walker had created demand through other means were their goods accepted onto drugstore shelves.14
In response to these difficulties, beauty culturists redefined and even pioneered techniques in distribution, sales, and marketing that would later become commonplace in the business world. Working outside the conventional wholesale-retail system of trade, they parlayed salon- and home-based enterprises into mail-order and door-to-door peddling operations. These were already familiar methods of selling that had, by the late nineteenth century, reached into small towns and rural areas of the country and brought an array of consumer goods into American households. In the cosmetics field, the California Perfume Company (later renamed Avon) became most famous for this sales strategy. Book salesman David Hall McConnell founded the company in 1886 when he discovered that the sample bottles of perfume he gave away were more popular than the books he sold. He turned over daily operations to a Vermont woman, Mrs. P. F. E. Albee, who developed a plan to recruit women to sell perfumes and toiletries in their neighborhoods. By 1903, there were about 10,000 such house-to-house “depot agents” across the country.15
Many women entrepreneurs successfully imitated California Perfume's sales strategy in the 1890s and early 1900s. In magazines and circulars, they advertised for clerks, sewing women, domestic servants, and women “doing hard, muscular work” who might prefer the ease and refinement of selling cosmetics. When a Miss Prim inquired about a genteel and private occupation, Bertha Benz described her plan “for giving paying employment to ladies everywhere.” She offered Prim a branch office covering her county in North Carolina, from which she could sell the “Famous Tula Water for the Complexion.” The work, she said, consisted “of filling agents’ orders of mailing circulars answering letters of inquiry etc