Taking Back Black Hair Care Business: Brooklyn’s Black Owned Beauty Supply Store Opened By Two Sisters

If you recall, one of the first black millionaires in America was Madam C.J. Walker. Walker created her fortune with a black hair care line up. She was truly a pioneer in her time.

However, since Walker generated her fortune, black women have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on hair care with no end in sight.

The problem is we have seem to lost total control over the industry we spend our hard earned money as few black people own the hair care products purchased, but maybe with this news things will continue to change.

Two sisters from Brooklyn, Judian and Kadeian Brown started their very own black hair care store called Black Girls Divine Beauty Supply and Salon. Naturally, they started the store in Brookly, NY, and they are doing very well for themselves.

In a business typically dominated by Koreans, the sisters idea for the business started when they were inside one of these stores.

“I go, ‘Look at all the faces on the boxes,’” Judian Brown told the New York Times. “Who should be owning these stores?”

Here is more of their story from the New York Times article on them last year:

The Brown sisters’ is one small shop in a multibillion-dollar industry, centered on something that is both a point of pride and a political flash point for black women: their hair. But the Browns are among only a few hundred black owners of the roughly 10,000 stores that sell hair products like relaxers, curl creams, wigs and hair weaves to black women, not just in New York but across the country. The vast majority have Korean-American owners, a phenomenon dating back to the 1970s that has stoked tensions between black consumers and Korean businesspeople over what some black people see as one ethnic group profiting from, yet shutting out, another.

[ADSENSE2]A growing awareness of this imbalance has spurred more black people to hang out their own shingles. The people producing the products have changed, too: As “going natural” — abandoning artificially smoothed hair in favor of naturally textured curls and braids — has become more popular and the Internet has expanded, black entrepreneurs, most of them women, are claiming a bigger share of the shelves in women’s medicine cabinets.

“We’re aware of where our dollars are going, we’re aware of the power of our dollars, we’re aware of the cultural significance of the way that we choose to wear our hair,” said Patrice Grell Yursik, the founder of Afrobella, a popular natural-hair blog. “There’s been a lot of taking back the power, and a lot of that is from the Internet.”

Yes, the sisters are still in business today and growing. After visiting their Facebook page, it appears they have expansion plans on the horizon with the development of a brand new website. Again, they talked about it on their Facebook page in interactions with their fan base. In addition and more exciting to me, they plan on teaching other black entrepreneurs how to open their own beauty supply stores as well.

It seems like the sisters understand the importance of teaching others to get involved in this billion dollar industry of black hair care instead of trying to hog it all for themselves.

I did reach out to them in hopes of securing an interview about their classes to teach entrepreneurs how to open their own beauty supply store and want to keep you informed. Hopefully they will respond and I will report the information to you.

SOUND OFF: Don’t you think there should be more black owned beauty supply stores around the country?

Source: NY Times