His Grandmother Sold Shea Butter to Survive. Her Grandson Sold It for $1.6 Billion and Gave the Money Back.

Richelieu Dennis was ten years old the first time the riots came. He watched from inside the city as the country that had made his family began to come apart. The following year there was a coup. Violent, definitive, irreversible. He grew up in the middle of it -shuttling between Liberia and Sierra Leone with his mother, Mary, and his sister, learning early that stability was something you carried inside you because the ground was not always going to hold.

His father died when he was eight. His mother held everything together.

His grandmother, Sofi Tucker, had done the same a generation earlier. Widowed at nineteen, she had built a life from what she knew -beauty preparations, made by hand, sold in the village market. Shea butter. African black soap. Oils and balms that had been passed down through women in his family for four generations. She sold them to survive. She raised her children. She left behind recipes.

He did not know it yet, but those recipes were going to travel to America.

He got a scholarship. His mother, watching the country deteriorate around them, decided it was time for him to leave. He arrived at Babson College in Massachusetts in the late 1980s -a school known for producing entrepreneurs -with his grandmother's knowledge embedded in him and no clear plan for what came next.

To make ends meet, he started selling shea butter to classmates. His mother would send supplies from home for his personal use. He shared them. People paid. It was survival, not strategy.

His plan, he has said, was to go back to Liberia after graduation and become a citrus farmer. The country was lush and underserved -orange trees and mango trees rotting on the ground because there was no cannery, no juice market, no infrastructure to turn abundance into income. He wanted to fix that. He wanted to go home.

Then graduation arrived, and home was gone.

His mother came to the ceremony. She had been in Monrovia when she booked her flight.

She took the last plane out before the rebels invaded the capital.

She left with two suitcases.

By the time she landed in New York, their home had been bombed.

There was no going back. Not next week. Not in another two weeks. The country he had been educated to return to and rebuild no longer existed in the form he had left it. There were twelve of them crammed into a Queens apartment -Liberian students and their families, all telling each other it would calm down soon.

It did not calm down.

The plan changed.

He set up a card table on 125th Street in Harlem, at the corner of Fifth Avenue. He laid out the shea butter, the African black soap, the preparations his grandmother had taught him and his mother had carried in her hands across the Atlantic. He started selling.

No storefront. No branding. No bank loan -the banks would not lend to an African immigrant without collateral or credit history. What he had was a table, a product that actually worked, and a community of Black and Latino consumers who had been largely ignored by the mainstream beauty industry. The big companies were making products for chemical relaxation. Nobody was making quality natural products for textured hair.

He could see the gap. He walked into it.

He and his college roommate Nyema Tubman and his mother Mary built Sundial Brands together -named for how the light falls differently on different people. They left their Queens apartment at 5 a.m. every day to manufacture and package the products, then went out in the afternoon to sell what they had made. They could not afford to build inventory. They sold each day's production that same day, then reinvested the money and did it again.

"We did that daily," he has said, "because we didn't have the resources to build up inventory."

The products were rooted in four generations of his grandmother's recipes. Every jar of shea butter carried Sofi Tucker in it.

By the early 2000s, SheaMoisture and Nubian Heritage were in Whole Foods, Vitamin Shoppe, Wegmans. Sundial had grown from a card table in Harlem to one of the most significant natural beauty companies in America -the number one brand in its category for Black women. It had done this without advertising and without surrendering ownership.

In 2017, Richelieu Dennis negotiated the largest natural beauty acquisition in American history.

Unilever paid $1.6 billion for Sundial Brands.

He stayed on as CEO. He had conditions. Among them: a $100 million fund to invest in businesses owned by women of color. He called it the New Voices Fund. He had built a company from a card table with no capital and no access to loans. He knew exactly what that absence cost. He was not going to let the next generation pay the same price.

"Something like 7 cents of every investment dollar in this country goes to a woman-of-color business," he has said. "With that disparity, our communities are never going to be self-sustaining. If I had had somebody who'd invested in me and my business, I probably wouldn't have taken 30 years to get here."

He invested in The Honey Pot. Beauty Bakerie. The Lip Bar. Sweeten. Company by company, filling the gap he had lived inside.

He also bought Essence magazine.

When Time Inc. put it up for sale, he acquired it and returned it to Black ownership for the first time in nearly two decades. The Essence Festival -which his grandmother could never have imagined, and which his mother lived to see -draws over 600,000 people to New Orleans every year. He does not see it as a media property. He sees it as the largest community of Black women in the world.

He also purchased Villa Lewaro -the historic estate of Madam C.J. Walker, the first self-made female millionaire in American history -and is turning it into an entrepreneurial incubator for women of colour.

In 2017, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia conferred upon him the distinction of Knight Commander of the Most Venerable Order of the Knighthood of the Pioneers.

He left Liberia with nothing. He came back as a knight.

His mother, Mary Dennis, who took the last flight out of Monrovia with two suitcases and found her home had been bombed before she cleared customs, has been with him every step of the way. She is his co-founder. She is the reason the recipes survived the war.

He has four daughters. He has said, of the women in his life -his grandmother, his mother, his daughters -that he has experienced firsthand what it costs to be a woman navigating a world that underestimates you. The companies he has built are his answer to that cost.

Sofi Tucker was widowed at nineteen and made beauty products to survive.

Her grandson turned those same products into $1.6 billion and gave the money back to the community.

The recipes made the journey. The family kept going.