Amityville, NY
www.sundialbrands.com

Sales: $240 million.

Sundial will be making a jump to our Top 30 roundup next month thanks to Unilever’s Nov. 2017 agreement to acquire the leading hair care and skin care company.  Sundial’s 2017 turnover was expected to be approximately $240 million, according to Unilever.

Sundial Brands will operate as a standalone unit within Unilever, and founder Richelieu Dennis will continue to lead the business as chief executive officer and executive chairman. Terms of the deal were not announced.

Sundial Brands has since brought in Kimberly Evans Paige in the newly-created position of chief operating and brand-building officer. A seasoned executive with more than 20 years of brand, innovation, and general management experience and a proven track record of building billion-dollar brands and businesses, she joins Sundial from her most recent role a chief marketing officer of Coty, Inc. where she stewarded the repositioning of several flagship brands.

As part of their agreement, Unilever and Sundial said they are creating the New Voices Fund with initial investment of $50 million to empower women of color entrepreneurs. The intention is to scale the fund to $100 million by attracting investments from other interested parties.

“The Sundial team has built differentiated and on-trend premium brands serving multicultural and millennial consumers that enhance our existing portfolio,” said Kees Kruythoff, president, Unilever North America. “Sundial is an important addition to our US portfolio of purpose-driven companies, which includes Ben & Jerry’s and Seventh Generation.”

Since its founding in 1991, Sundial has championed inclusive beauty and has served the unmet needs of consumers of color through a robust innovation pipeline, product offerings and purpose-driven business model. Through its Community Commerce business model, B Corp and Fair for Life certifications, Sundial’s approach complements the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) to accelerate growth while increasing positive social impact, according to Unilever.

“I’ve always wanted Sundial Brands to be an inspiration to other minority-owned companies of how a business against all odds can achieve excellence, have significant social impact in our communities and be successful on a world stage,” said Richelieu Dennis, founder and chief executive officer, Sundial Brands. “I am excited Sundial and Unilever have created this partnership, rooted in a purpose-driven ethos, that represents an incredible opportunity to take our Community Commerce economic empowerment and impact model to another level.”

Amityville, NY
www.sundialbrands.com

Sales: $225 million (estimated).

Sundial Brands LLC has been growing fast. Named to the 2015 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing firms, the company entered the prestige category in 2016 with the launch of Madam C.J. Walker Beauty Culture hair care in Sephora and continued with the recent launch of Nyakio prestige skin care in Ulta earlier this year.

In 2016, the company launched its first-ever national awareness platform for SheaMoisture with #BreaktheWalls—a transformative multimedia effort to highlight the divisive constructs of beauty and move towards the inclusive shopping experience that all women deserve.  On the heels of its success, Sundial Brands announced the next phase last fall, in which it issued a direct challenge to the beauty industry’s concept of standardized ideals by posing the short, yet powerful, question:  “What’s Normal?” Both efforts were award-winning, with #BreaktheWalls receiving WWD/Beauty Inc.’s 2016 “Ad Campaign of the Year” and “What’s Normal” receiving Best Beauty Campaign in 2016 by Yahoo’s first-ever Diversity in Beauty Awards (DIBs).

“With SheaMoisture’s launch of #BreakTheWalls earlier this year, we furthered our 25-year mission to spark meaningful conversation and action towards true inclusion and a more empathetic mindset in the beauty industry and our society, which includes bringing down both literal and metaphoric walls,” said Dennis.  “With our first iteration, we showed the physical walls coming down.  With ‘What’s Normal?’ we are confronting the mental walls that encourage us to force-fit ourselves and others into falsely constructed beauty and ‘good hair’ ideals.  By questioning the very concept of a normal standard, especially as it applies to beauty and to hair type or texture, we can begin to see how arbitrary, narrow and potentially destructive it is and course-correct ourselves…celebrating the beauty—and normalcy—of everyone’s differences.”

Sundial Brands operates under its purpose-driven business model called Community Commerce, which equips underserved people with access to the educational and entrepreneurship opportunities and resources that enable them to create lasting value for themselves, their businesses and their communities. It results in an ability to build stronger, self-sustaining communities and enterprises, said the firm. Community Commerce invests in underserved women via supplier partnerships, fellowships, scholarships, mentorships and other resources.  This includes the establishment of partnership with Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business Minority Programs to establish the Sundial Brands Fellowship for minority women executives, business owners and entrepreneurs as well as its partnership with Babson College (Sundial CEO’s alma mater) for the SheaMoisture #BreaktheWalls Scholarship for top high school young women to attend Babson College’s Summer Study for High School Students, among several other programs.

With shea butter central to many of the company’s products, Sundial ethically sources the ingredient from 15 women’s cooperatives in Northern Ghana and currently invests in more than 8,000 women entrepreneurs and impacts almost 15,000 families who benefit from Community Commerce efforts.  Ten-percent of sales of SheaMoisture’s Community Commerce collections are directly reinvested in communities around the world, and Sundial’s Community Commerce programs are “fairer than fair trade.” In Sundial’s Shea butter supply chain alone, since 2014 its efforts have resulted in the increase in school enrollment of the children of women Shea butter processors from 37% to 97%; the increase of healthcare insurance registration for the women Shea butter processors from 48% to 99%; and the increase in individual incomes by 7X with the premium wages the women receive.