There is a particular kind of grief that comes with watching a brand built for us—by one of us—disappear from the shelves it fought so hard to reach. Adwoa Beauty is gone now, and if you let the beauty industry tell it, the story ends there. But the real story is not about a brand closing. It is about what the industry does to Black founders when the cameras stop rolling and the DEI press releases stop being written.
As Black Enterprise reported, a court ruling on May 1 converted Adwoa Beauty’s Chapter 11 reorganization into a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case—ending its current corporate structure. Now, there’s a court-appointed trustee overseeing the distribution of remaining assets to satisfy outstanding debts. The brand that founder Julian Addo built from $80,000 of her own personal savings, the same brand that made it to Sephora shelves in 2020 and became a symbol of what was possible for Black women in beauty—is being liquidated.
And we need to sit with what that actually means.
When the “racial reckoning” of 2020 happened, the beauty industry moved fast. Suddenly, Black-owned brands were being stocked, celebrated, and featured in campaign imagery. Retailers that had historically given premium shelf space almost exclusively to brands that were not built with Black women in mind were now spotlighting textured haircare as if they had believed in it all along. Adwoa Beauty was one of those brands called to the table. Addo answered that call, showed up and delivered products that a loyal community of customers genuinely loved.
What she did not receive was the infrastructure, access to capital, or institutional support that would have actually allowed her to survive at that level in the long term. The cost of maintaining a Sephora presence proved unsustainable….
Source link
Read Full Article by Sammy Approved at blackamericaweb.com
Source link
