From Liberia War Zones to a $1.6 Billion Exit: How Richelieu Dennis Turned His Grandmother's Shea Butter Recipe Into an Empire

Richelieu Dennis arrived at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, from Monrovia, Liberia, on an academic scholarship in the late 1980s. He was the first in his family to study abroad. The plan was to get his degree in Business Administration and return home to help rebuild his country.

Then the First Liberian Civil War started in 1989. And going home stopped being an option.

What came next — the decades of street-level hustle, family sacrifice, and unrelenting entrepreneurship that followed — is one of the most remarkable business stories in American history. And it starts, literally, on the streets of Harlem with a folding table and his grandmother's recipes.

The Table on 125th Street

When Dennis graduated from Babson in 1991, he could not return to Liberia. The war had made it too dangerous. His mother, Mary Dennis, and his grandmother had long formulated skincare products from shea butter and natural African ingredients — products rooted in a tradition that West African women had developed and passed down for generations.

With limited resources and no other options, Dennis began selling those products on the streets of Harlem. A table. Jars of shea butter and skin care formulations. Word of mouth. Long before "Black-owned beauty" was a marketing category, Richelieu Dennis, his mother, and his roommate Nyema Tubman were working the sidewalks of 125th Street, building a customer base one sale at a time.

He named the company Sundial Brands. The flagship product line would eventually become SheaMoisture.

Building While Black, With Nothing

The early years were brutal in the way that all bootstrapped businesses are brutal — compounded by every structural barrier that Black entrepreneurs face in America. No venture capital. No industry connections. No retail shelf space at major chains. Limited access to the banking credit that allows businesses to scale.

Dennis navigated all of it by doing what his grandmother had taught him: create something so good that the market comes to you. SheaMoisture products, formulated for textured, melanin-rich hair and skin that mainstream beauty brands had spent decades ignoring, found a loyal audience because they actually worked.

"We were building a business that served a community the industry had written off," Dennis has said. "That wasn't a limitation. That was the biggest market opportunity in beauty."

He was right. It just took the industry twenty-five years to figure out he was right.

The Long Build: 1991 to 2017

What makes the Sundial Brands story so significant to Hood Forbes is the timeline. This is not a story about an overnight viral moment or a lucky investor meeting. This is twenty-six years of daily execution.

In 2010, SheaMoisture entered Target stores — a turning point that gave the brand national distribution and connected it to millions of consumers who had been looking for exactly what the brand offered. Revenue accelerated. The brand expanded to include Nubian Heritage and other lines. The product portfolio deepened.

By 2017, Sundial Brands had built a business generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, with an owned brand identity and a loyal customer base that had no equivalent in the mainstream beauty industry.

That year, Unilever — one of the world's largest consumer goods conglomerates — acquired Sundial Brands in a deal reported at approximately $1.6 billion.

From a folding table on 125th Street to a $1.6 billion exit. Twenty-six years.

What He Did With the Money

Richelieu Dennis did not buy a yacht. He built a fund.

In 2018, he announced the New Voices Fund — a $100 million investment fund dedicated to Black women entrepreneurs. The thesis was explicit: the proceeds of one community's wealth-building should go back into creating the next generation of community wealth.

To date, the New Voices Fund has invested in hundreds of Black women-owned businesses across food, beauty, health, and technology — creating a multiplier effect on the original exit that extends far beyond any single balance sheet.

In the same year, Dennis acquired Essence Communications — the parent company of Essence magazine, one of the most iconic Black media brands in American history — from Time Inc., returning ownership of that institution to the community it serves.

He used his exit not just to build personal wealth but to build infrastructure for the next generation.

The Grandmother's Recipe, the Grandson's Legacy

What Hood Forbes wants every reader to carry from this story is the origin point. Richelieu Dennis did not arrive with capital, connections, or a clear path. He arrived with knowledge — specifically, generational knowledge about natural skincare formulated for Black bodies that his grandmother had developed and passed down.

That knowledge, applied on a folding table in Harlem, compounded over twenty-six years into a $1.6 billion business.

The lesson is not about shea butter. The lesson is about what you already have — the culture, the community knowledge, the traditions that the mainstream market has been selling back to your people for a premium for decades — and whether you are positioned to capture the value of what you know.

Richelieu Dennis was. His grandmother was.

And now, through the New Voices Fund, hundreds of the next generation will be too.