HOW MADAM WALKER DEVELOPED HER PRODUCTS AND SALES FORCE
After selling her line of products from door to door and turning a room of her Denver home into her first salon in 1906, Madam C. J. Walker began visiting the black communities in Colorado’s small mining towns. Soon she realized her market was limited because of the state’s small black population.
She and her husband, Charles Joseph Walker, began to travel through the Southern, Eastern and Midwestern United States. After a year and a half they settled in Pittsburgh where she opened her first beauty school, Lelia College, which she named after her daughter Lelia McWilliams Robinson (who later was to become known as A’Lelia Walker).
Madam Walker is surrounded by some of her top Ohio sales agents (Madam Walker Family Archives www.madamcjwalker.com)
They continued traveling and training sales agents. In 1910 she moved to Indianapolis where she built her first factory. By this time she already had trained hundreds of women in the Madam Walker System of Beauty Culture.
In 1913 after extensive travel throughout the United States, she visited Cuba, Panama, Jamaica, Costa Rica and Haiti to expand her business internationally.
In 1917–the year before Mary Kay was born–she hosted her first national convention of Walker sales agents. Like Mary Kay, she gave prizes to the women who had sold the most products and brought in the most new agents. But she also gave prizes to the women who had contributed the most to charity. Then she took her leadership a step farther by encouraging the women to be politically active. At the end of the convention they sent a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson urging him to support legislation to make lynching a federal crime.
By the time Madam Walker died in May 1919, she claimed that she and her teaching faculty had trained more than 20,000 Walker agents.
Her original five products–Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, Tetter Salve, Temple Salve, Vegetable Shampoo and Glossine–addressed specific needs. At a time when most American homes lacked indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity, hygiene practices were very different from today. Baths were a weekly rather than daily ritual because of the time and effort it took to pump water from an outdoor well, heat it on a wood stove, etc. Hairwashing happened infrequently: perhaps once a month for many and sometimes only once or twice during the winter. As a result, many women developed severe scalp disease, which resulted in hair loss.
Madam Walker encouraged women to wash their hair more often and to apply the ointments, which contained sulphur, an ingredient that long had been used by physicians and pharmacists to heal skin ailments like dandruff and psoriasis.
Over time Madam Walker began to realize that selling hair products was a means to a more important end. While her vegetable shampoo and ointments effectively healed scalp disease, it’s also true that her system of beauty culture gave her customers more control over the care of their hair. Soon she saw that there was more to what she was doing than selling hair products. She realized that she could empower women and helped them become economically independent at a time when racism and sexism consigned most black women to working as maids, cooks, sharecroppers and washerwomen like she had been for much of her life.
“I am not merely satisfied in making money for myself!” Madam Walker told an audience in 1913. “I am endeavoring to provide jobs for hundreds of women of my race!”
Her mission was about so much more than her Wonderful Hair Grower! Her mission had become to “grow” women’s minds and opportunities.
A’Lelia Bundles, Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter and biographer, holds a 100 year old portrait of Walker from her Madam Walker Family Archives
I love Black History Month because I learn something new every day!
The truth is, I’m already immersed in black history every month, week and day of the year, but in February it feels as if I have lots of company. It seems that whereever I turn, there are websites, blogs, television networks, radio programs and lectures all celebrating the fascinating people I love to study.
Langston Hughes called A’Lelia Walker “the joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s”
Writing books about my great-great-grandmother, Madam C. J. Walker, and her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, has given me an opportunity to learn not just about them, but about the eras in which they lived and the people they knew. Whether it’s Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois or Langston Hughes and Florence Mills, they crossed paths with some of the most interesting and influential black women and men of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through their lives, I’ve been able to tell a more inclusive account of American history than the version I learned in school. From Madam Walker’s birth in 1867 as America was emerging from the Civil War through World War I and the Harlem Renaissance to A’Lelia Walker’s death in 1931 during the Great Depression, I’ve been fortunate to view America through a lens that gives women and African Americans their rightful place in the nation’s story.
Mayor Ballard unveils a Legacy Award Pillar. Looking on are Lance Bundles, Judith Ransom Lewis and A'Lelia Bundles (Credit: Robert Scheer/IndyStar.com)
Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles, presented remarks on behalf of the families. “As I pondered the lives of these great Hoosiers,” she told the audience, “I couldn’t help but imagine them all seated together at a magnificent banquet. What would Madam Walker–a pioneer of the modern hair care and cosmetics industries–have to say to Eli Lilly–a pioneer of the modern pharmaceutical industry–about building a business?”
A'Lelia Bundles speaks on behalf of the Legacy Award families (Photo: Robert Scheer/IndyStar.com)
Among the descendants and family friends who attended were Robert Montgomery, son of jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery; Ted and and Anita Sewall, representing the May Wright Sewall family; Lance Bundles, great-great-grandson of Madam Walker; and Judith Ransom-Lewis and Robert Ransom, grandchildren of Walker Company attorney F. B. Ransom.
Madam C. J. Walker was born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana on December 23, 1867. Her prospects for success were nil.
Sarah Breedlove was born in this Delta, LA cabin in 1867
Yet, by the time she died in May 1919 at Villa Lewaro–her Irvington-on-Hudson, New York mansion–she had transformed herself into a millionaire entrepreneur, philanthropist, patron of the arts and political activist.
Newspaper headlines from the Pittsburgh Courier –“Heiress Weds ‘Mid Pomp-Splendor”—to the New York World—“Thousands Attend Wedding of Negro Heiress in Harlem”—tell only part of the story.
Mae Walker's 1923 wedding was the social event of the season (aleliabundles.com)
For Harlem’s social event of the season and of the year, there were parties galore, guests from three continents and a groom from a prominent family. There also was a major glitch: the bride was in love with someone else. (more…)
HOW MADAM WALKER DEVELOPED HER PRODUCTS AND SALES FORCE
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