We Must Do Better!

It is disheartening to conceive the following reality!  According to an article in Naturallymoi.com, African Americans purchase nine times more beauty and grooming products than other ethnic groups, but only 1% of the market share is owned by African Americans.  According to a Forbes article – Women 2019, Dominique Fulker wrote “In beauty specifically, the spending power of black women in the US is a staggering $7.5 billion…. versus non-Black consumers.” 

It is time that a major shift in ownership take place in this billion-dollar industry that has been dominated by Koreans.  But how can we move forward if we don’t support what we already have?  For example, Crescent Beauty Supply on 14000 Woodward in Highland Park, MI is a black owned beauty supply store that has been in the Detroit area over 2 years.  However, right across the street is a non-black beauty supply store.  We at Black Yellow Pages are perplexed to think that if Black people had the choice to patronize a black owned store instead of a non-black store across the street, the black owned store would win every time.  Sadly, this is not the case!  We feel that Crescent Beauty Supply should be inundated with business so much so that expanding or opening another location would be inevitable! 

Black Owned Businesses have many challenges.  In regards to Beauty supply stores, the ability to leverage is one of them. The majority owners and distributors are Korean.  Our Black owners are not afforded the same prices and don’t have the volume or partnerships to order bulk as the Korean owners who have each other to leverage. Therefore, the black beauty supply store prices are usually a bit higher.  But we who can make the sacrifice and pay a few pennies more must do so!  Only we can catapult our Black Businesses to a higher level.

We can and we must do Better!