Corporations: Making Black Beautiful

Young, black and ambitious. George E. Johnson applied to a Chicago finance company in 1954 for a $250 loan to make and market a hair-straightening cream. An unimpressed loan officer called the idea “ridiculous” and turned him down. A few days later, Johnson breezed into another branch of the same company, said he wanted the money for a California vacation—and got it on the spot. With that saucy subterfuge, and an additional $250 from a friend, Johnson started what is today the country’s largest publicly held, black-run manufacturing firm: Johnson Products Co., whose annual sales from hair preparations reached $12.6 million last year.

The company is now expanding into a potentially rich new area. Aiming to capitalize on the swiftly growing demand for black cosmetics, Johnson Products has begun test-marketing a low-priced line of liquid makeup, face powder and skin cleaner. The items, formulated to complement black skin tones, come in shades of browns, tans and reds. “Our future growth will depend on how well we do in cosmetics,” says Johnson, 43. Until recently, white-owned companies virtually ignored the demand for black cosmetics, and most of the black firms in the field are still small and regional. With his company’s long experience in marketing to drugstores, variety chains and supermarkets, especially in black areas, Johnson expects to have an edge on his competitors.

Follow the Tracks. Johnson has always acted to keep the odds in his favor. During the first months of his firm’s operation, he held his job as production chemist at Chicago’s Fuller Products Co., a black-owned cosmetics firm. He moonlighted nights and weekends, making the hair straightener in a rented place. Then he hustled as a one-man sales force through the city’s black barbershops, and soon his swings took him to Indianapolis, Detroit and beyond. Working the black ghettos, he never needed research to pinpoint his sales area. “I knew how to find it,” Johnson says wryly. “Go to any strange town and just follow the railroad tracks.”

By 1958 his wares, including an Ultra Wave hair cream and rinse for men and an Ultra Sheen line of hair products for women, were selling nationally. Johnson’s toughest time came two years ago, when the surge of black pride led to more natural hair styles, specifically the Afro, which severely scissored demand for straighteners and the other hair relaxors. Johnson responded by introducing Afro Sheen, a product line that includes hair spray and a “comb easy” shampoo for the natural look.

Today Johnson gets mixed results from his old products. Sales of Ultra Wave, including the original hair straightener, remain sluggish, but the similar Ultra Sheen line for women is doing well. “Women are too feminine to stay with one style forever,” Johnson explains. “With a hair relaxor like Ultra Sheen, a woman has a choice— she can go natural, then move to a bouffant style and go back again.”

Pride Pays. The company went public last year, mainly to be in a better position to acquire other concerns. Johnson and his family still own 83% of the shares, or more than $44 million worth at latest prices. At the firm’s modern brick headquarters in Chicago, he has a mostly black staff, but has hired two white vice presidents for marketing and finance. Almost all of his $2,000,000 advertising budget goes into black print media, radio and an occasional TV special aimed at nonwhites. Johnson’s promotional philosophy: “You must emphasize self-pride with blacks, something that other people have not paid attention to.” One recent Ultra Sheen ad for example, shows a beauteous model ‘in a modified Afro hair style. “Be a natural woman,” urges the copy.

Johnson, who was born in Mississippi and raised in one of Chicago’s black ghettos, is obviously comfortable with success. Recently he moved his wife Joan Betty, who has worked in the company from the beginning, and his four children into a 14-room house in Glencoe a North Shore suburb. Active in community affairs, he helped start the Independence Bank of Chicago to give other black entrepreneurs an easier start than he had. His goal is to make Johnson Products big enough to crack the cosmetics market for whites as well as blacks. Today that is an idea that nobody would call ridiculous.