Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company
| Private | |
| Industry | Cosmetics |
| Founded | 1910 |
| Founder | Madam C.J. Walker |
| Headquarters | Indianapolis, Indiana, United States |
| Products | Cosmetics |
| Revenue |  |
| Website | http://www.madamewalker.net |
The Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company (Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Co., The Walker Company) was a cosmetics manufacturer incorporated in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1910 by Madam C. J. Walker. It was best known for its African-American cosmetics and hair care products, and considered the most widely known and financially successful African-American owned business of the early twentieth century. The Walker Company ceased operations in July 1981.
Madam C.J. Walker, then Sarah Breedlove, first formed the idea of her company in Denver, Colorado, in the early twentieth century. Like many women of her era, she suffered from scalp infections and hair loss because of hygiene practices, diet and products that damaged her hair. Walker had initially learned about hair and scalp care from her brothers, who owned a barber shop in St. Louis during the 1880s and 1890s. Around 1904, Walker—still known as Sarah Breedlove McWilliams Davis (after marriages to Moses McWilliams and John Davis) became a sales agent for Annie Malone, an African-American businesswoman, who founded a company in 1900 manufacturing a "Wonderful Hair Grower." Before 1900, there were several other black women who called themselves "hair growers" and who advertised in black newspapers including the Baltimore Afro-American and the St. Louis Palladium. In 1900 Gilbert Harris spoke about "Work in Hair" at the National Negro Business League convention in Boston.
After moving to Denver in July 1906, she worked as a cook at a boarding house. Edmund L. Scholtz, a wholesale druggist in Denver, assisted her in developing her own ointment to heal scalp disease.
In January 1906, she married Charles Joseph Walker and changed her name to Madam C. J. Walker. Together they marketed and sold "Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower." in Denver and surrounding Colorado communities. The first advertisements for Walker's haircare products appeared in 1906 in The Statesman and featured a front and back image of her shoulder-length hair which boasted the growth was from only two years' treatment.
In July 1906, Walker and her new husband left Denver to begin traveling throughout the Texas, Oklahoma and several southern states to market their product line. In September 1906, her daughter, Lelia, took over the business operations in Denver. By May 1907, tensions between Malone and Madame came to a head, and The Statesman reported that Walker would discontinue business in Denver altogether and planned to travel throughout the southern United States and eventually to northern states.
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