London Summers connects with Cornell McBride Jr. President of the top leading multimillion dollar hair care brand Design Essentials, they recently celebrated 35 years in the hair care industry and donated $1 million to Spelman College and Howard University to help support their Cosmetic Chemistry program.
Exclusively Interviewed by London Summers
HH: It’s a pleasure to connect with you Cornell! Design Essentials made headlines with a recent $1 million donation to Spelman College and to Howard University. What does this historic contribution mean to you personally, and how does it reflect the brand’s values?
Personally, I attended Howard University with a degree in marketing, but I think just for me, my family, and the business, the goal at the end of the day is to be a community impact brand so we have an opportunity to help student journeys at an early stage and for each school the gift was different. For Spelman, the pledge was to support their Cosmetic Chemistry program. A lot of people don’t realize that cosmetic chemistry (the science of formulating products for the beauty industry) is a specialized field, and it’s a degree that’s not widely offered. In fact, I believe fewer than five universities across the country over it, which shows you how limited the access is. So when we heard that Spelman was launching the first Cosmetic Chemistry program, we were excited. You also don’t see many cosmetic chemists who are African-American, even though many products are made for African-American consumers. There’s a lack of representation in the field.
This program gives students an early introduction to cosmetic chemistry, which is incredibly valuable. For us, it was important to not only be part of that initiative through financial support but also to offer hands-on opportunities like teaching talent directly in our lab (McBride Laboratories). It gave us the chance to go beyond the donation and create an internship for someone genuinely interested in entering the field. Partnering with Spelman opens the door to broader collaboration. Everything we do goes beyond writing a check, so letting students see how we operate, from marketing and sales to product development. Offering internships gives them real-world experience and deeper exposure to the business side of the industry.
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With Howard University, the focus is centered around entrepreneurship. I went to school to be an entrepreneur, and Howard has a national HBCU entrepreneurship program. Even though it’s housed at Howard, the program reaches students at HBCUs across the country. It gives them the opportunity to develop their ideas, practice pitching, and learn how to bring their business concepts to life. So beyond providing scholarships, we’re also helping students prepare for pitch competitions and explore ways to secure funding to launch their businesses. That’s important to us because we strongly believe in encouraging entrepreneurship. Just like with Spelman, our involvement goes beyond the financial contribution. We want to give students access to real-world case studies and let them see what we see, how we operate, how we make decisions. It’s not just about the donation; it’s about full integration. And most importantly, it’s about giving them real experience that can shape their future careers.
Design Essentials’ contribution to HBCUs: the brand donated $1 million to Spelman College in Atlanta towards the launch of their Cosmetic Science Program, and $1 million dollars to Howard University in Washington D.C. for the creation of The Design Essentials Community Fund, which helped support Howard University School of Business students who aspire to become entrepreneurs and business leaders.
HH: Your father, Cornell McBride Sr., built a foundation for Black hair care innovation. How have you carried that legacy forward while also putting your own stamp on the business?
My father started in 1973 and his first product line was Sta Sof-Fro. He built that business and sold it in ’88. By that time, I had graduated from college in ’87 and In 1990, he started McBride Research Laboratories, which is where Design Essentials comes from. I’ve been there from the beginning. My original role was General Manager, handling day-to-day operations. Eventually, I became President, still focused on daily operations. But if you think about Design Essentials, it was really built around entrepreneurship. It was about creating a distribution network that gave people the opportunity to control their own destiny. Now, that might sound odd, how do you build a business by giving someone else control over their own future? But you can. Beyond that, it was about creating quality products for the salon. The distributor makes money and the salon makes money. We built an ecosystem where everyone in the value chain thrives. That’s the foundation of Design Essentials. As we continue to move the brand forward, we’re doing a few key things. First, we’re redefining our customer, not just by demographics but also by psychographics. We’re moving away from defining customers by ethnicity and instead focusing on hair type and texture. When you look at the world, what we’ve learned is that two-thirds of the global population has textured hair. If you think about it from the perspective of the “original man”, the earliest humans descended from Africa and that original descendant had curly hair.
Over time, as people migrated across different climates, hair texture evolved. So, how we define our customer from then to now matters. There’s a broader group of people who can relate to and identify with Design Essentials. Our first evolution is to make sure we’re speaking to a broader audience based on texture and need state, not ethnicity. Second, we want to broaden Design Essentials beyond hair to include more aspects of beauty and expand even further under the Design Essentials brand. Our consumers trust the name, and they believe we can offer more.
Third, there’s a global opportunity. Historically, we’ve grown the brand in places like Europe and Africa but now, we’re thinking bigger. It’s not just those regions. There’s opportunity across Asia, the Pacific, and beyond. We’re working to build Design Essentials into a global beauty brand, and that’s the direction we’re heading. Design Essentials has always stood out for blending professional salon expertise with consumer accessibility.
HH: What do you think has been the key to maintaining relevance across generations?
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I think at the core of how we maintain our relevance is something that’s always been central to who we are: education and training. We educate, we teach, we train stylists and we’ve been doing it for 35 years. Beyond hair education, we’ve hosted classes on business empowerment and other topics. Training stylists has always been foundational to our brand. Along the way, we also realized something important: the biggest gap isn’t just with professionals, it’s with the consumer. The person sitting in the salon chair usually wants to know one simple thing: How do I maintain my hair at home? If you’ve made an investment in a style, you want it to last. You want it to look the way it did when you first got out of the chair. Or, if you’re styling at home, you want it to look like you know what you’re doing. Either way, there’s often a lack of information and people don’t always understand their hair type, texture, or what their hair needs. The most powerful thing a stylist can give a customer is the knowledge of how to take care of their hair on their own. For us, continuing on that path means empowering both professionals and consumers. We want them to understand their hair types, their textures, and what it takes to maintain their hair, not just in theory, but practically.
HH: The beauty industry is evolving, with Black-owned brands finally receiving more visibility. Where do you see Design Essentials’ role in shaping the future of textured hair care globally?
The way I see our future is this: if we, as brands, are successful and demonstrate excellence in marketing, deliver high-quality products, and stay committed to community impact then the landscape changes. The opportunity grows, and so does the customer pool. In that future, it’s not just that Design Essentials expands, but that the entire space grows, because consumers are becoming more informed. The more they understand about hair type and texture, the less their decisions are based on things like ethnicity, and the more they’re based on what their hair actually needs. For example, if your hair is curly or wavy, you’re more likely to deal with dryness and tangling. That makes sense as straight hair doesn’t tangle the same way coily or curly hair does. So naturally, you need products that moisturize, detangle, and support your hair’s texture. That understanding in texture-based hair care is what I believe will drive the future of the industry. And as more brands, including us, continue to speak in the language of texture and focus on needs instead of outdated categories, the industry as a whole becomes bigger, more inclusive, and more effective. Beyond products, the brand has been deeply invested in community impact, education, & entrepreneurship.
HH: How do you balance being a beauty company and a cultural movement?
We see it more as prioritizing community impact, because that’s where it all starts. Everything we’ve done historically, from a business standpoint, has always been rooted in our community. Our distributors reflect our community. The people who sell Design Essentials often own their own businesses. And beyond just selling product, we’ve always focused on education and empowerment, teaching them how to run a business. We’ve been doing that for 35 years. That’s the business empowerment side. On the community side, we believe that wherever we operate, we have a responsibility to give back. If we’re in a market, we owe it to that community to make an impact.
Take, for example, our work in Chad, Africa where we source ingredients for our African Chebe Collection. It wasn’t just about what we could extract from the region, we asked what can we pour back in? For us, that meant supporting access to clean water and helping install well systems and pump infrastructure. These are basic needs we often take for granted in the U.S., but in those communities, it changes lives. If you’re growing up having to draw water daily from a well, your outlook is completely different, so we wanted to contribute in a meaningful way. One of the projects we’re most excited about is in Kenya. We’ve partnered with Africa’s Next Supermodel to identify young women living in refugee camps and helped take them through a journey toward becoming supermodels. Some of them have gone on to experience real success. That project represents the kind of impact we’re proud to make. Design Essentials gives us a platform to deliver a broader message, one centered on community impact and making a difference. And when I say “us,” I mean it as a family, our larger community. That includes the people who buy Design Essentials, those who sell it, and the team who works behind the scenes. This brand gives us the resources and reach to do meaningful work together. As President, you’ve seen the business through challenges and growth.
HH: What leadership lessons have shaped the way you guide Design Essentials today?
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One of the biggest leadership lessons I’ve learned is that everything in business comes down to three things: people, product, and process. In the show, The Profit, the host talks about those exact three P’s: people, product, and process. It sounds simple, and it is. But the hardest things in life are often the simplest. We just tend to overthink them. Over the years, I’ve realized that while having a great product is important, it’s the people who truly make the difference. You need people who believe in the mission, who have the right skill sets, qualifications, and values. You also need to understand the power of good people and strong culture. With those two things, even when mistakes happen, your team will know how to recover. Good people and a healthy culture naturally led to creating strong processes. So now, if I have good people, a solid process, and a great product, I’m in a good place.
HH: Looking ahead, what’s next for Design Essentials? Can you share any innovations, partnerships, or initiatives that continue the mission of excellence and empowerment?
Design Essentials is continuing the journey to become a global beauty brand. That means expanding beyond hair care and into body and skin, offering our customers the same level of quality they’ve come to expect, just across more categories. We see real opportunity to evolve the brand this way, both domestically and internationally. And as we grow, we’ll continue to emphasize our role as a community impact brand. No matter how we expand, whether it’s our customer base or our product portfolio, what matters most is that we stay rooted in making a meaningful difference in the communities we serve.
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