Camille Rose: From Kitchen Startup to Nine-Figure Haircare Brand

Janell Stephens didn't start Camille Rose as a business plan. She started it in her kitchen in 2011, mixing products for her family because nothing on the shelf was doing the job. Fifteen years later, the brand sits on shelves at Target, Ulta and CVS, and it's on track for nine-figure revenue this year.

"I call myself a kitchen chemist," Stephens, founder and CEO of Camille Rose, said in a recent interview with Entrepreneur. "I was just in the kitchen making a plethora of products at the time."

A career pivot

Stephens didn't come to haircare from the beauty industry. She trained as a speech-language pathologist and spent her early career working with stroke survivors, people with swallowing disorders, traumatic brain injuries and speech disorders. After graduate school, she opened a home-health agency and ran it for about eight years.

Then she changed direction. Her husband was completing a medical fellowship in hematology and oncology, and Stephens sold the clinic to pursue something she'd been interested in for a long time: formulating hair and skin products. For about a year, she studied under an herbalist, learning how oils, herbs and butters behaved on hair and skin.

"He taught me about herbs," she says. "He taught me about the benefits of oils, how to make an emollient, the benefits of different butters and how they would affect or how they would apply to the hair and skin."

Building Camille Rose

The origin story is personal, and that's the point. Stephens wanted products that delivered visible results on her own hair and on her children's. She was also reading labels closely, and she didn't like much of what she found.

"My kids had needs; I had needs," Stephens says. "I needed products that were showing a difference in my hair and in their hair, and I was also [reading the labels of] everything that I was using back then."

Instead of settling, she started buying ingredients and testing formulations herself. "From that point on, I became obsessed with it," she says. "I just found it so fascinating, finding, ordering different ingredients, trying it out. If it works, yes, I'll keep it. If it doesn't, throw it out, start over."

The first product she jarred, labeled and sold was Camille Rose's Algae Renew Deep Conditioner, made with blue-green algae and vitamins. It's still one of the brand's bestsellers. Curl Love Moisture Milk, another early product, remains central to the line.

Stephens calls the brand's "core four" Cocoa Nibs & Honey Growth Serum, Curl Love Moisture Milk, Algae Renew Deep Conditioner and Almond Jai Twisting Butter. If you're a new customer trying to figure out where to start, she says she usually points them to the deep conditioner.

Her philosophy

The brand's identity rests on a simple idea: ingredients that nourish the body from the inside should work on the outside, too. Food-inspired ingredients run through the line, and Stephens draws a direct line between nutrition and personal care.

"If it nourishes your body inside, my philosophy and what I live by is that it should have those same benefits to the outside of the body," she says.

Sea moss is a good example. Consumers already use it as a nutritional ingredient because of its mineral content, and Stephens sees similar potential in products applied to the skin and hair.

Here's where it gets more nuanced, though. Stephens is wary of the "all-natural" label that's become a marketing default in beauty. "We're not all-natural," she says. "We never claim all-natural, and I don't think anybody should."

Camille Rose uses natural and naturally derived ingredients, but it also uses preservatives. That's not a contradiction. Beauty products have to stay stable, safe and effective over time, and food-grade ingredients alone can't always do that. "You also cannot make one product solely on food-grade ingredients," Stephens says. "The rest are all ingredients that are science-backed."

From kitchen to retail

Stephens started out giving products away to friends and family in exchange for feedback. When people kept asking for more, she put up a website and started taking orders. Demand came from repeat requests, word of mouth, Facebook and customers who saw results, not from a marketing budget.

That worked for a while, but the business needed more than one person's kitchen could offer. Stephens reached out to a beauty brand whose products she already used and asked whether she could work with its chemist. The chemist agreed to a contract arrangement and helped turn homemade recipes into formulas that could be produced at scale.

"It went from a pinch of this and a dash of that to real percentages," Stephens says.

That shift from pinches to percentages mattered more as the brand left its kitchen behind. Stephens says it took roughly a year and a half to find a manufacturer and chemist whose capabilities and values matched the company's needs.

The breakthrough came at a hair show in 2012. Stephens had set up a booth to introduce Camille Rose to customers and industry contacts, and a visitor stopped by. She didn't initially know which retailer he represented. They talked for about an hour about the brand's origins, why she started it and the purpose behind each product.

"At the end of that hour, he pulled out his card and he said, 'I am a buyer from Target. I would love to fly you up,'" Stephens recalls.

The brand launched in 100 Target stores. That sounds like a clean win, but the orders were brutal. "My first orders were thousands per product, so I was nonstop," Stephens says. She leaned on family and friends to help fill them, and she handled nearly everything else herself, from customer service and shipping to packing, social media and operations. "I was my everything," she says.

Staying close to the product

As Camille Rose grew, Stephens moved operations out of her home into a small warehouse, hired another person to help with formulation and gradually built a more conventional organization. The company now has staff across marketing, social media, digital, creative, operations, customer service and warehousing. Its team is 35 people.

Stephens hasn't stepped back from the lab, though. "I'm still a product developer for Camille Rose," she says. "Of course, I have a lab and a team of chemists and researchers that's working with me."

The process is more disciplined than it was in the kitchen. A new product can take anywhere from several months to a year. Stephens starts with a concept, then works with her team to develop, evaluate and refine it. She tests products herself, works with stylists and hair models, and tries them across different curl types and textures. The team also benchmarks them against established products on the market.

When a formula falls short on shine, frizz control or overall performance, it goes back to the lab. That's the standard Stephens worries about most as production scales. "I needed to make sure that my manufacturer and the chemist that I'm working with honored our formulas," she says.

How she grew the brand

Visibility has driven Camille Rose's growth. The company leans on social media, influencers and celebrity relationships, and TikTok is a priority. Earlier this year, reality TV star Kim Kardashian used Camille Rose products to style her 8-year-old daughter Chicago's hair, which put the brand in front of a much larger audience.

Stephens's advice to founders is blunt: start. "Turn the camera on and start talking about your product," she says. "You may have five people listening; you may have 500 people listening, but keep at it. Turn the camera on."

For founders launching a haircare line or any other consumer product, she says the first 90 days should focus on brand identity, awareness and consistent outreach. That means building a strong brand guide, becoming the brand's own first influencer and using both organic and paid partnerships to build an audience. She also backs old-fashioned grassroots work: handing out samples at parks and festivals, setting up at local markets and talking directly with shoppers in neighborhood stores.

Her last point is the one that's easiest to ignore. Stephens urges founders to keep moving, even when the next step looks small. "If you have an idea, don't just let it sit out there and don't just talk about it," she says. "Write out a plan to do something and move forward."

From kitchen experiment to nine figures

Stephens didn't start with a factory or a funding round. The first products were homemade, and the business grew by bringing in the people who could turn a recipe into something a retailer would stock. Chemists formulated the products. Manufacturers produced them at volume. Marketers sold them, and warehouse staff shipped them. Today that operation employs 35 people.

Here's the thing: most founders who get a product to market stall when operations fall behind demand. Stephens' company moved in the opposite order, adding the team as the product proved itself. That sequence is less glamorous than a splashy raise, but it's the one that tends to hold up.

The headline number is the revenue target. The company is on track for nine-figure revenue this year, which means at least $100 million. For a brand that started in a home kitchen, that's a serious milestone, and it doesn't happen by accident.

The forward-looking claim is harder to judge. Stephens projects continued double-digit growth in 2027. That's a forecast, not a result, and founder projections tend to run optimistic. The track record so far gives it some credibility, though. If you're building a consumer brand and wondering whether your operations can keep pace with demand, this one is worth studying. The real test will come once the growth gets harder to sustain.