black female entrepreneurs
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Coming Clean … With Lauren Napier
Lauren Napier wants you to take it off—take it all off. She’s the CEO of Lauren Napier, maker of a single product: a luxury makeup-remover wipe. Her corporate values are triple mint, even by the most conscious of consumer standards. Her 4-year-old company is not only black-owned; it’s 100 percent operated by women. And her…
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Glow-Getter: Santana Caress Benitez Cooks Like Your Mother … and May Just Steal the Scene
Chef Santana Caress Benitez doesn’t call herself an actress. This, despite her appearance as Lourdes “LuLu” Blackmon in Netflix’s recent series reboot of Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It; a scene-stealing supporting role that has literally sent Hollywood calling (as evidenced by the feature-film audition she’d sent off just prior to our conversation). Personally asked…
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Susan Akkad Is Making Beauty More Multicultural—and Knows Black Women Don’t Need to Be ‘Fixed’
“Egyptians believe that they invented beauty,” says Susan Akkad. She’s a woman who would know, given her degree from Harvard in ninth- to 14th-century Arabic literature and diplomacy. For nine years, Akkad has held the position of senior vice president of local and cultural innovation at Estée Lauder, overseeing multiethnic innovation for some 25 brands…
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Turning the Tide: Nonprofit Helps Black Female Entrepreneurs Compete With White Men
Social entrepreneur Alfa Demmellash may be a married mother of two, but she knows the plight of single mothers intimately. Raised in part by a single mother in her native Ethiopia at the height of the devastating Derg regime, Demmellash—who escaped violence that killed family members when she immigrated to the United States at age…
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Why We Need More Women of Color Running Their Own Businesses Under a Trump Presidency
Let’s face it: Half the country has been in a funk since Nov. 9. Not only did Donald Trump become president, but he went about shoring up white supremacy as swiftly as possible. Under his leadership, hate groups have grown and protections for marginalized people have been eagerly dismantled by the administration. And people of…