Meet the Black family behind the Luster’s Pink hair lotion you grew up with
TheGrio...
For nearly 70 years, Luster Products has been a fixture in Black haircare. Now, the founder’s granddaughter, Resa Luster-Mac, is carrying the family legacy into a new generation.
If you grew up Black in America, you can probably recognize Luster’s Pink Lotion from a mile away. It lived on your grandmother’s vanity and in your family’s hair drawer, a bottle your mother reached for on Sunday nights somewhere between the wide-tooth comb and the silk scarf. Odds are it was rubbed into your curls, waves or coils as a child. And just as that bottle was passed down through generations, so was the company behind it.
Founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1957, Luster Products has stayed Black-owned and family-owned for nearly seven decades. Yet for most of that run, consumers knew very little about the family behind the brand.
“That was by design,” Resa Luster-Mac, chief marketing officer of Luster Products and granddaughter of founder Fred Luster Sr., told theGrio.
The reason, she explained, goes back to her grandfather’s upbringing. He grew up in Mississippi, where his family was forced off the farm they lived on when he was a child after people realized they were Black. He eventually made his way to Chicago, where he worked as a barber on the South Side before creating the products that would become Luster Products. Those experiences behind the chair, she says, shaped his entire approach to business.
“To keep your clientele as a barber, they’ve got to want to come back because you provide great service,” she said. “He believed you should always make a great product or provide a great service, and it should speak for itself.”
When Luster launched, there was no internet and no social media, so the product did the talking. However, today in a world of social media algorithms and content creation, brands need more than just good products to reach consumers.
“We let the product do the talking for us to respect his wishes,” Luster-Mac said reflecting on the cost this approach had on the business. “But I realized, okay, we’re being forgotten because people don’t just buy products anymore; they buy people. In our case, they they need to buy into this family. They need to know we’re Black-owned, we’re family-owned.”
That meant stepping into a space the family had long avoided. And while the new territory felt scary for some members of the family, Luster-Mac explains it was a necessary step. In recent years, Luster-Mac has taken to platforms like Threads and Instagram to share the family’s history, introducing longtime customers to the people behind a brand they have known their whole lives.
“I see my role as like a storyteller,” she explains. “So I hope that people are rediscovering us. [And that] I’m helping people learn that we’re more than just a brand that’s slapping a label on a bottle or a jar. We care about the consumers more than they know. We know they work hard for their money, so we work extra hard behind the scenes.”
“One thing I want people to know about Luster is that we are a one-stop shop, meaning we care about our formulations. We’re not just outsourcing things and putting them in a bottle. We know where they’re coming from,” she added.
Though she is part of the third generation to work for the family company, Luster-Mac says she was never pressured to take over the family business. In fact, none of the Luster kids were. Though Fred Luster Sr. felt it was important to keep the company Black-owned and family-owned his children, Jory, Fred and Sonja found their way into the business naturally.
“My grandfather felt like so many things were taken away from our people, being people of color, that he really wanted the company to stay in the family. And it’s crazy how all the stars align for him,” she shared. “His kids, so my dad, my aunt, and uncle, who are now the owners, have helped take the company to the next level.”
Her father, Jory, studied business and earned his MBA. Her uncle, Fred Luster II, studied chemistry, giving the company a trained chemist, whereas its founder had been self-taught. Her aunt, Sonja Luster-Munic, studied technology and later brought tech and HR into the business. And now with her degree in marketing, Luster-Mac is helping further elevate the brand. However, she admits that when she was brought in for an internship, she did not imagine her father would hire her. And while navigating the family business comes with unique struggles like facing your parents in the boardroom, Luster-Mac says finding her voice has been instrumental for not only her personal journey but also the brand. Today, all five of the founder’s grandchildren work at Luster. “This is not a typical 9-to-5 where I’m the CMO and I have no strings attached,” she noted. “This is my life.”
According to the Luster Products CMO, telling the family’s story isn’t only about visibility. It’s also about trust, especially in a textured hair care market where consumers have been burned before. Recalling the number of times she’s been told “Luster isn’t really Black-owned,” Luster-Mac continuously corrects the narrative because while it can be exhausting she explained: “I don’t blame the consumer for saying things like this to me, because they’ve been misled so many times.”
When looking at a textured hair routine, there is an array of steps from clarifying to hydrating shampoos to conditioning treatments, moisturizers, stylers, etc. That demand, Luster-Mac says, has drawn a number of companies into the category that don’t truly understand the customer.
“People see the opportunity, and they just want to get in the space and capitalize,” she said. “But it’s like, okay, you’re entering our space. Do you really care about your end user?”
At Luster Products, she said, the answer starts with owning its own formulas rather than private labeling. The company has chemists on staff at Lusterland who check every incoming ingredient. Similarly, the company also does its own testing on textured hair.
“We’re not relying on a general market party to tell us, ‘Oh, this is going to work on Black people.’”
That care shows up in small ways, too. When Luster-Mac developed her first product line, a kids’ collection, she wanted a tear-free shampoo. So she bought several tear-free shampoos already on the market and tested them the way a parent might, by lathering each one and putting it in her own eyes.
“I can’t tell you how many times my eyes were burning,” she recalled.
After talking with the company’s chemist, she learned that some tear-free formulas can leave hair drier, so she dropped the tear-free claim and prioritized moisture instead. “Whatever we make in this building, we’re using it on ourselves,” she continued, noting that she uses Luster products in her and her family’s haircare routine. Come January, Luster will mark 70 years as a Black-owned, family-owned company. And though her grandfather passed away when she was two, she says his legacy continues to radiate through the walls of the company’s headquarters.
“I think it’s pretty iconic to work with people who remember my grandfather and can pass stories on to me, like, ‘Oh, your grandpa was here. He didn’t like this,’ or ‘This would make him so excited,’” she noted, reflecting on the generations of employees at the company.
For decades, Fred Luster Sr. let his products speak for themselves. Now his granddaughter is making sure his story (and work) is heard.