Can SheaMoisture Untangle Itself?
Sundial Brands CEO Richelieu Dennis was between meetings at a conference in Phoenix last April when his phone buzzed with a text from his 20-year-old daughter: “Dad, WTF?”
A commercial for SheaMoisture, Sundial’s flagship haircare brand, had ignited a controversy on social media. In the ad, four actresses—three white women with long tresses and a light-skinned, apparently biracial woman with silky curls—bemoaned what they call “hair hate,” offering brief anecdotes about being picked on for having red hair or waking up with bed head.
This is typical fare for a haircare commercial. But SheaMoisture is not your average haircare company. The founders (Dennis, his mother, and his college roommate) were refugees of the brutal Liberian civil war who had begun selling Dennis’s African grandmother’s natural soaps on the streets of Harlem, and they’ve built their venture into a $700 million company. To SheaMoisture’s core user base—black women who love its moisturizing and curl-enhancing products and had embraced the brand’s authentic African heritage—the black-owned, family-run company signaled with the ad that it would be chasing white consumers. Many of SheaMoisture’s key fans worried this shift would distract the company from their needs. An array of black influencers tore mercilessly into the company on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, creating viral memes such as a photo of Rachel Dolezal—the polarizing figure who became famous in 2015 for claiming she had become a “transracial” black woman, though she was born white—with the caption “More Shea products for me!” Desus & Mero, the comedy duo and internet personalities, lampooned the spot, describing it as a remake of the Wayans brothers comedy White Chicks and joking that Sundial’s VP of brand strategy, Christine Keihm (a white woman), probably attended Howard University and had an ankh on her business card. “It was just baffling to me,” says Elle, owner of YouTube channel Quest for the Perfect Curl, of the women cast in the SheaMoisture ad. “If you want a seat at the table, that’s fine. But you can’t kick me out of my seat.” Sundial employees began referring to the uproar as Hate Gate.
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