There is an ongoing debate within the Black-owned beauty and personal care product space about ownership. Some argue that it’s almost impossible to get (and keep) our shampoos, skin care and personal products on the shelves at big box stores without the backing of corporate heavyweights like Procter & Gamble and Unilver, while others believe that selling any share of our companies to these brands is a bad for business and the product’s integrity.
Suggested Reading
Beatrice Dixon, CEO and co-founder of Plant-based feminine care product company The Honey Pot fits in the latter camp, and she just put her integrity where the money was.
The Honey Pot is known and loved for their line of natural, cruelty-free, hypoallergenic products made especially for ladies’ nether regions. Dixon has been extremely intentional about who she allowed to have a stake in her multi-million-dollar business.
That’s because her connection with the brand is extremely personal: In an interview with Forbes, she said that the idea came to her from the ancestors. After months of living on antibiotics to treat bacterial vaginosis, Dixon said her late grandmother appeared to her in a dream with an idea that would change her life.
“She told me that she’d been walking with me, and seeing me struggle, and she knew what to do. The funny thing is, a lot of the remedies that I was doing individually, I needed to put all of them together to make myself a potion,” she said.
Once she developed her product, Dixon, who worked as a buyer at Whole Foods at the time, started what she called a “hood clinical trial’ with customers she encountered in the store who were looking for vaginal wellness products. Her hard work eventually paid off and she got her Honey Pot products on the shelves at Target. But to scale her business and compete with established brands, she needed help.
Dixon said that finding the ideal partner wasn’t easy, as she heard “no” more often than “yes.” But as offers started to come in, she made the choice to turn some down, including one for $450 million that she says didn’t feel like the right match.
“I would have been selling my soul,” she told Forbes.
Dixon eventually made a $380-million deal with Compass in 2024, who took a majority stake in the business. She said she’s confident she chose the right partner who understands the value that she and her team bring to the brand that came out of her dreams.
“They believed in who we were. They understood that in order for us to get to the next phase—to find Honey Pot a home—we would need to be the ones to do that. They gave us the ability to keep our team. They believed in our strategy moving forward,” she told Forbes.
Straight From 
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.