Inc. Magazine 09.2019

I was selling shea butter to my class-

mates. I would get supplies from

my mother for my personal use. My

ambition was to go back to Liberia

and become a citrus farmer. People

were starving there, but it’s such a

lush, lush agricultural haven. You’d

have these orange trees and you’d

have these mango trees, but they

would just spoil. There was no can-

nery. There was no juicing market.

That problem remains with devel-

opment in Africa, all of the resourc-

es that are extracted out, as opposed

to developed in. You could say I

eventually did become a, maybe not

a farmer, but more of a harvester. I

never got to the citrus farming idea,

because I got here in ’87, and then

the internal conflicts in Liberia

really started to escalate.

So you became a refugee

entrepreneur.

By 1989, the conflict was basically

full-blown, so there was no going

back. That’s when I started to sell

more, just as a means to buy food,

because there was no money coming

from home.

What made you focus on

shea butter?

There are things that Liberians have

been using in their communities for

centuries. To protect themselves

from the sun, to survive, to eat, to

live. And they were never quite

developed commercially. So shea

butter is something that has been

used in our culture for centuries, all

over Africa, for very specific pur-

poses that people have been trying to

solve for in the West. So you start to

educate people on the benefits of it.

It was also around that time that

the mindset or the consciousness

of consumers started to shift, and

they started to question what they

were putting on or in their bodies,

where it was coming from. Was it

ethically sourced? Was it exploiting

people?

And then your mother moved to

the U.S. to join the business?

She actually didn’t move—she came

to my graduation, on the last flight

that left Monrovia before the rebels

invaded the capital city. She left

with two suitcases, and by the time

she landed in New York, her home

had been bombed.

So Liberia’s implosion impelled

Sundial to become a real company

rather than a college survival gig.

We started making different prepa-

rations, whether it was soap or

incense or just the shea butter by

the pound or by the ounce, and

selling them in Harlem on 125th

Street and Fifth Avenue. I set up a

table and started selling. There were

12 of us in a Queens apartment, and

we were all just like, things will

calm down back home and we can

return. It’ll be another week, maybe

another two weeks. Nobody expected

it to last almost 20 years.

But lots of guys are on 125th

Street selling stuff on card tables.

At what point did you break out?

There are a lot of guys on 125th

Street with card tables. There are

very few guys on 125th Street with a

Babson education. One of the things

that I learned: There’s always an

opportunity in a disorganized mar-

ket for the guy who can organize it.

So we started to deliver. Back then,

it was beepers. They’d beep us, give

us an order, and then we’d deliver.

That’s how we started our distribu-

tion business. We had a Toyota

Prius; we loaded up all our stuff and

we started delivering to the vendors,

and then we started supplying for

flea markets and county fairs. Then

we started in health food stores, and

started to think about going retail.

What made you think you could

make that transition?

Being on the street allowed me to

very quickly understand that our

customer wasn’t being serviced in

Funding the Future

Dennis started a

$100 million fund

to invest in businesses

run by black women.