Carolyn Aronson has spent more than four decades in the beauty industry, but her story started behind the salon chair. Before becoming the founder and CEO of It’s a 10 Haircare, she was a hairstylist with ambitions of becoming a salon owner and an early interest in figuring out how to turn creativity into a business.
Money was part of that education early on. Aronson credits her adoptive father with teaching her something she still considers fundamental to entrepreneurship: the difference between understanding money and knowing how to manage it. “A lot of people are literate about money, but they overspend,” she tells ¡HOLA!. “My adoptive father was really, really key in teaching me how to money manage.”
© IG: Carolyn AronsonThose lessons would eventually be tested on a much larger scale. Aronson experienced a failed first haircare company, started again with It’s a 10 and later took on significant debt to buy out her business partner and gain full control of the company. Twenty years into the brand's story, she is entering another period of change, with a major rebrand, Khloé Kardashian as its first worldwide brand ambassador and a new memoir that puts the successes, failures and decisions behind the company on paper.
Aronson is also looking ahead to the release of her new book, Lift, Hold, Shine: How I Built a Billion-Dollar Beauty Empire One Strand at a Time, coming in January 2027. Aronson spoke with ¡HOLA! about the decisions behind her success, discovering her Puerto Rican roots and what two decades in business have taught her about knowing when to take a chance.
“The zeros just get bigger after your business decisions. And I did not let that deter me or scare me. I knew I had a very, very distinct vision on where I wanted to take the company, what I wanted to do with it.”
From the salon chair to business owner
Aronson knew she wanted to be a hairstylist when she was eight. Once she got to beauty school, her ambitions quickly grew. “I immediately thought, I want to be a salon owner,” she says. Still, it took years for her to feel ready. She remembers telling her adoptive father over and over that she wanted a salon of her own, until at 30, she finally went to him and said she was ready to do it.
His response has stayed with her. “He’s like, ‘I have no idea why you want to have your own business, but sure. Let’s, let’s like delve into this.’” Aronson credits him with teaching her not only how to understand money, but how to manage it. “My adoptive father was very instrumental in teaching me, not just financial literacy, because we hear that word a lot, but teaching me financial discipline and what that means.”
The salon gave her a different kind of education. Years behind the chair meant working with thousands of clients and trying countless products, experience that would eventually shape the way she approached haircare. “I don’t think there’s anyone better to create a brand than a hairdresser because literally over my years, I’ve touched thousands of heads. I’ve used thousands of products and I really understood maybe what the industry was lacking.”
© IG: Carolyn AronsoHer entrepreneurial interests also extended outside the salon. Aronson began investing in real estate in her twenties, buying and flipping properties and building wealth that would eventually help finance her first haircare company.
The first business failed. Then came 'It’s a 10'
Because of her real estate background, Aronson was already accustomed to taking financial risks before entering the beauty business. Her first venture was a company called Link, which she started with approximately half a million dollars and ultimately failed. “We lost everything,” she says. “A lot of QC issues, a lot of hard lessons learned.”
However, her next attempt looked very different. It’s a 10 began with $80,000 and one product, the Miracle Leave-In. Aronson had spent years working directly with clients and believed that experience gave her an advantage when it came to understanding what people actually needed from their hair products.
“I don’t think there’s anyone better to create a brand than a hairdresser because literally over my years, I’ve touched thousands of heads. I’ve used thousands of products and I really understood maybe what the industry was lacking.”
Without a large marketing budget, the company went directly to the people Aronson knew could make a difference: hairstylists. Millions of samples were distributed through the professional beauty world. “We made a great product, and we got it into people’s hands.”
That experience shaped a philosophy she still follows: “Create something people can’t live without and everything else comes.”
© IG: Carolyn AronsonWhen the numbers got much bigger
A decade into building It’s a 10, Aronson faced the financial decision that would reshape the company. She wanted to buy out her partner and take full control of where the business was going, a move that meant accepting a level of debt she had never taken on before. “For the first time ever, I really took on massive debt and put massive debt on a company that had solid legs at the time,” she says.
Aronson puts the total loan amount at approximately $186 million. The transaction was more complicated than simply borrowing that amount to purchase the other half of the business. “I started a new company that bought an old company, so the debt had to buy the whole old company,” she explains. “So I had to still pay it all off and put a ton of my own money in.”
The numbers were bigger, and the size of the risk did not change what she believed the company needed. “The zeros just get bigger after your business decisions,” she says. “And I did not let that deter me or scare me. I knew I had a very, very distinct vision on where I wanted to take the company, what I wanted to do with it.”
Taking control also meant being willing to sacrifice revenue. Aronson says sales initially went backwards and that during her first year she eliminated more than $20 million in business from rogue distributors as she worked to regain control over the company.
“I believe that as women we have a sixth sense. We have a gut, and we need to use it more.”
Finding her Puerto Rican family at 26
There was another part of Aronson’s identity she would discover only after her career was already underway. Born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and raised in Michigan, she grew up with little connection to Puerto Rican culture. At 26, she found her birth family and discovered just how large it was.
“I’m 11 of 12 children. My mother was the oldest of 13 children,” she says. “When I found my birth family, it was like 150 people between aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews.”
For Aronson, finding them was about much more than learning where she came from. It gave her a connection to a culture and family she hadn’t experienced growing up. “It was incredibly exciting to be able to embrace my culture, my people, to understand who I truly am and to find out where I really came from,” she says.
It also gave her some insight into a part of herself that had been there since childhood. Aronson discovered that her birth father was a serial entrepreneur who worked with his hands, taught himself different skills and moved through multiple businesses and industries.
“We have fire in us, and I think that's something that, no matter how I grew up, no one could take that fire from me.”
“Maybe they weren’t around when I was growing up, but maybe in my blood, my birth father is a serial entrepreneur,” she says. “Worked with his hands, was always creative, multiple different industries and business and self taught. So you know, that makes sense to me.”
© IG: Carolyn AronsonWhy Khloé Kardashian came after 20 years
It’s a 10 spent its first two decades without a celebrity face, and Aronson says she was willing to wait until the partnership felt right. “I wasn’t going to settle,” she says. “I knew it had to be a very, very organic process.”
That person turned out to be Khloé Kardashian, who became the company’s first worldwide brand ambassador as It’s a 10 celebrates its 20th anniversary. According to Aronson, the connection was already there long before anything was signed. “I know that her mother, Kris Jenner, loves the brand and she was like, ‘Oh my God, one of my kids have to do this.’ They’ve been using it for years.”
Aronson also wanted the company to be established enough to stand independently of whoever represented it. “We’re not looking for somebody just to blow us up overnight and be a one hit wonder or something, you know, kind of fleeting.”
Kardashian joins the company at a significant moment. The brand is celebrating 20 years while Aronson oversees new packaging and a broader rebrand.
“It was incredibly exciting to be able to embrace my culture, my people, to understand who I truly am and to find out where I really came from.”
Putting the lessons into 'Lift, Hold, Shine'
After two decades of building It’s a 10, Aronson is putting the story behind the company on paper. Her first book, Lift, Hold, Shine: How I Built a Billion-Dollar Beauty Empire One Strand at a Time, arrives this October, taking readers through the successes as well as the decisions, setbacks and sacrifices that came with building the business.
The philosophy behind the book is closely tied to the way Aronson talks about entrepreneurship. During our conversation, she described the importance of knowing when to stay the course, when to walk away and when a decision is worth putting everything behind. Those lessons came through experiences that ranged from losing her first haircare company to taking on enormous debt years later to gain control of It’s a 10.
© IG: Carolyn AronsonBut Aronson also sees telling that story as a way to give something back. “If I can inspire just one woman, one entrepreneur, one Latina or Latino, you know, when we have the gift of storytelling in our society and sharing our experiences, that’s when other people learn from it and hopefully are inspired by it.”
Her advice for anyone afraid to take the risk
After everything Aronson has built, lost and rebuilt, failure doesn’t carry quite the same meaning for her. “I encourage people to do it because the worst that can happen is you fail and you start over,” she says. “You will live through it, I promise.”
It is also why she doesn’t believe progress always looks like moving ahead. “Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forward,” she says. “And that’s obviously what I did with It’s a 10. I had to take a hundred steps backwards after 10 years of success in order to be able to move forward.”
Her final advice is simple: “You have to be able to let go of those reins and know when it’s time to just push all your chips in.”
