Years before she was the matriarch for one of music’s most famous families, Tina Knowles started a business catering to professional women who needed their hair styled—and quickly.
Speaking on Wednesday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Knowles said Cécred, the hair care line she launched with her daughter Beyoncé Knowles Carter in February 2024, is the product of four decades in business, fashion, and entertainment. In the Houston hair salon where the Knowles matriarch started her career, she relied on products that had human hair ground into them to add protein to strands. Knowles would whip up butter and hot olive oil treatments to bring more moisture and balance to her clients’ hair, including her daughters. Knowles said both Knowles Carter and actress and singer-songwriter Solange Knowles worked in her salon.
“The dream has always been to create a product that had everything that you need in one product and one step,” Knowles told Fortune senior writer Sheryl Estrada. “And Beyoncé had that dream as well—because I was doing all those things to her hair.”
Knowles said Knowles Carter decided to fund the hair care line herself rather than working with outside investors because the two were so focused on research and development. Investors balked at the costs. Knowles said they wanted a product that wouldn’t merely lay on top of strands to make them feel smooth, but instead wanted a product that could penetrate all types of hair textures.
“Our customers have done the marketing for us because it’s really a quality product,” said Knowles.
The line is a family story, Knowles told Estrada. Her daughters first worked as sweepers at Knowles’s Headliners salon, and Knowles said she worked with plenty of entrepreneurial women there. Blockbuster musical group Destiny’s Child got its start performing for salon customers.
Knowles started the Headliners hair salon business after her marriage ended, and she needed to support her children. She told Estrada she decided at the time she would never be dependent again. Her own salon visits would take hours, so she made Headliners a go-to spot for professional women short on time. Clients were seen within 15 minutes or they would get their money back.
Knowles, who published her bestselling memoir, Matriarch, last year, said that while writing it she learned that the women in her family had a history of working and designing clothing as seamstresses, going back to her great- and great-great-grandmothers, who were enslaved. She later styled Destiny’s Child through its rise and cofounded a fashion label.
Since launching two years ago, Cécred has posted the most successful prestige hair care debut in Ulta Beauty’s history, won 89 beauty industry awards, and expanded into the U.K. The team behind the brand tests its styling and restoring serums and conditioners in three countries to try to reach every hair texture.
Despite the success, Knowles was candid about how two divorces in her past have shaped her. When she divorced at 59, she thought her life was over. But Knowles picked herself up and made it a turning point. She went back to museums, she said, and picked up art books and prioritized herself again. For years, she had remained low-key in order to avoid embarrassing her children, she said.
“I didn’t take credit for a lot of the work that I did as a woman,” said Knowles. “We just do it because it needs to be done.”
At 70, she found herself going through a second divorce, which also left its mark.
“There’s something about those divorces that make you take a look at yourself,” she added. That’s when she started writing, partly to set an accurate record down about her family, which strangers narrate on a daily basis on social media. Writing it down, she said, became therapeutic. It made her a bestselling author at 71.
Now at 72, Knowles has shifted her focus to philanthropy, a passion she’d like to pursue full-time in the next few years. She chairs BeyGOOD, Beyoncé’s charitable foundation, on top of Cécred. She also has her own charity, Waco (Where Art Can Occur), which she started with her ex-husband. The group mentors girls from Los Angeles communities, offering them trips to art museums and lessons in etiquette, as well as teaching them life skills they wouldn’t receive otherwise.
Next up, she plans to work on the Vision Theatre in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park. Actress Marla Gibbs invested in the theater and planned to turn it into a performing arts center, but lost the building after riots occurred. The city has since poured millions into its restoration, and Knowles plans to follow Gibbs’s lead and make it a community arts center.
Knowles noted that after about five career pivots, she goes into new ventures with no fear. Her advice to younger generations is to give it your all, and if it doesn’t work, bring what you learned into the next thing you do. A strong work ethic matters, she said, along with never feeling entitled to anything.
“Just be authentically yourself,” said Knowles. “That’s my mantra.”
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