Camille Rose Is on Track for 9-Figure Revenue — 14 Years After a Kitchen Start

Haircare brand Camille Rose is on track for nine-figure revenue this year, with projected double-digit growth continuing into 2027 — fourteen years after founder and CEO Janell Stephens first mixed products in her kitchen.

The brand now sits on shelves at Target, Ulta and CVS with a team of 35 employees. Its breakout moment came earlier this year, when reality TV star Kim Kardashian used Camille Rose products to style her 8-year-old daughter Chicago's hair.

"I call myself a kitchen chemist," Stephens told Entrepreneur. "I was just in the kitchen making a plethora of products at the time."

How a speech pathologist became a founder

Stephens didn't start in beauty. She trained as a speech-language pathologist, working with stroke survivors and people with swallowing disorders, traumatic brain injuries and speech disorders. After graduate school, she opened a home-health agency and ran it for roughly eight years.

Then she sold the clinic while her husband completed a medical fellowship in hematology and oncology, and pivoted to a long-standing interest: formulating hair and skin products. She spent about a year studying under an herbalist.

"He taught me about herbs," she said. "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 the brand from a personal need

The business grew out of a problem Stephens couldn't solve at the store. She wanted products that delivered visible results for her own hair and her children's, and she was scrutinizing ingredient labels.

"My kids had needs; I had needs," Stephens said. "I needed products that were showing a difference in my hair and in their hair."

"From that point on, I became obsessed with it," she added. "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 the Algae Renew Deep Conditioner, made with blue-green algae and vitamins. It remains a bestseller. The brand's "core four" line-up:

• Cocoa Nibs & Honey Growth Serum
• Curl Love Moisture Milk
• Algae Renew Deep Conditioner
• Almond Jai Twisting Butter

The food-inspired philosophy — with a caveat

Camille Rose leans on food-inspired ingredients and draws a connection 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," Stephens said. Sea moss, valued for its mineral content as a nutritional ingredient, is one example.

But Stephens rejects "all-natural" marketing claims. "We're not all-natural," she said. "We never claim all-natural, and I don't think anybody should." The brand uses natural and naturally derived ingredients alongside preservatives — necessary, she argues, for stability, safety and performance over time. "You also cannot make one product solely on food-grade ingredients. The rest are all ingredients that are science-backed."

What does the Target deal change for founders?

Stephens started in 2011 as a hobbyist, giving products to friends and family in exchange for feedback. When repeat requests kept coming, she built a website and took orders, with growth driven by word-of-mouth, Facebook and customer results.

Scaling demanded precision. She contracted a chemist through another beauty brand, who converted kitchen recipes into manufacturable formulas. "It went from a pinch of this and a dash of that to real percentages," Stephens said. Finding the right manufacturer and chemist took roughly a year and a half.

The retail breakthrough came at a 2012 hair show. A buyer stopped at her booth, talked with her for an hour about the brand's origins and products — and then revealed himself. "He pulled out his card and he said, 'I am a buyer from Target. I would love to fly you up,'" Stephens recalled.

Camille Rose launched in 100 Target stores. The first orders ran to thousands of units per product, and Stephens called on family and friends to help produce them while handling customer service, shipping, packing, social media and operations herself. "I was my everything," she said.

Staying hands-on at scale

The company has since moved from her home to a small warehouse and now to a fuller organization spanning marketing, social media, digital, creative, operations, customer service and warehousing. Stephens still runs product development. "I'm still a product developer for Camille Rose," she said. "Of course, I have a lab and a team of chemists and researchers that's working with me."

New products take months to a year to develop. Stephens tests them herself and with stylists and hair models, across different curl types and textures, benchmarking against established market products — and returning to the lab to refine shine, frizz control or performance. "I needed to make sure that my manufacturer and the chemist that I'm working with honored our formulas," she said.

Growth now runs on social media, influencers and celebrity relationships, with TikTok a priority. Her advice to founders is blunt: "Turn the camera on and start talking about your product. You may have five people listening; you may have 500 people listening, but keep at it."

For a new product launch, she recommends the first 90 days focus on brand identity, awareness and consistent outreach — a strong brand guide, the founder acting as the brand's first influencer, and both organic and paid partnerships. She also champions grassroots tactics: samples at parks and festivals, local markets, and direct conversations with shoppers at neighborhood stores.

Her final instruction for founders with an idea: don't let it sit. "Write out a plan to do something and move forward."