Some empires start with a product. Sara Spencer Washington’s started with a classroom. She opened a salon in Atlantic City in 1913, studied advanced chemistry at Columbia, and in 1919 founded the Apex News and Hair Company — then built it into a system of laboratories, schools and tens of thousands of sales agents that put beauty careers into Black women’s hands across the country.
Hold the scale of it in your mind. The Apex system grew to include laboratories, a drug company and a publishing arm. Around 200 people worked at the Apex plant. And out in neighborhoods everywhere, roughly 45,000 part-time sales agents sold Apex products door to door — women earning money on their own schedules, carrying a Black-owned brand into homes a storefront might never reach.
But the piece of the empire this page loves most is the schools. Apex Beauty Colleges grew to 11 beauty schools in the United States, plus schools abroad, and at their peak they were graduating as many as 4,000 students a year. Think about what a graduating class like that actually means: thousands of women a year walking out with a trade, a certificate and a way to feed a family that nobody could take away from them. Washington wasn’t only selling hair products. She was manufacturing independence, class after class.
An empire with a patent and a World’s Fair honor
She was a builder in the laboratory, too — she held a patent on a hair-straightening process, the mark of a founder who understood the chemistry behind the chair, not just the business in front of it. That foundation in advanced chemistry, earned at Columbia, ran underneath everything Apex became.
By the mid-1930s, Apex was the largest Black-owned business in New Jersey. And in 1939, at the New York World’s Fair, Washington was honored as one of the “10 Most Distinguished Businesswomen” — national recognition, in her lifetime, for a woman who had started with a single Atlantic City salon in 1913.
She died on March 23, 1953, and the buildings and brands have changed hands and names since then. What hasn’t changed is the blueprint: train women, give them a product worth selling, pay them to carry it into their own communities, and let the graduates build the next generation. Every beauty school class, every agent network, every founder who insists on teaching while she sells is walking a road Sara Spencer Washington paved — 11 schools wide and 45,000 agents strong.
Join the conversation
Be honest: had you ever heard Sara Spencer Washington’s name before today — and why do you think the Apex story, with numbers this big, gets told so much less than some others? And if you could sit in one of those Apex classrooms for a day, what do you think those 4,000 graduates a year understood about business that we’re still relearning? Tell us below.
Source note: Sara Spencer Washington (1889–1953) — opening a salon in Atlantic City in 1913, studying advanced chemistry at Columbia and founding the Apex News and Hair Company in 1919; the Apex system growing to include laboratories, a drug company, a publishing arm and Apex Beauty Colleges with 11 beauty schools in the U.S. plus schools abroad, graduating as many as 4,000 students a year at their peak; around 200 people working at the Apex plant and roughly 45,000 part-time sales agents selling Apex products door to door; Apex becoming the largest Black-owned business in New Jersey by the mid-1930s; Washington being honored at the 1939 New York World’s Fair as one of the “10 Most Distinguished Businesswomen”; her holding a patent on a hair-straightening process; and her death on March 23, 1953 — is from Alfred University and New Jersey Women’s History profiles and Liberty and Prosperity.
