UPDATE: May 18, 2021, 4:24 p.m. ET HellaBlack will officially launch on Tuesday, May 18 at 7 p.m. ET. You can watch the celebratory Instagram Live (which will also begin at 7 p.m.) here.
Shoppers seeking out Black-owned businesses will soon have an innovative new way to find them.
HellaBlack, a new ecommerce platform launching in August, aims to provide a sleek one-stop shop to find products from Black brands, including apparel, beauty, homewares, kids’ products, and more. (It’s not affiliated with the podcast of the same name.) On the website, sellers will be able to use a long list of built-in tools — including blog templates, customizable virtual “mini-stores,” and a streamlined customer-vendor messaging system — to share their brands’ stories and move their products. The ultimate goal, according to the company’s Kickstarter, is to “build Black wealth.”
HellaBlack won’t be the only online marketplace focused on Black-owned businesses: Pioneering platforms like WeBuyBlack and BLK + GRN (as well as the Buy Black movement in general) have been around for years. But HellaBlack’s founders say they still see an opening for a resource uniquely focused on user experience and digital marketing, both of which can be roadblocks for minority-owned businesses.
Black-owned small businesses in particular face disproportionate difficulty in securing capital to invest in the one-on-one marketing agency consultations that other businesses rely on. And the New York Times reported in 2019 that despite being the “fastest growing segment of business owners,” Black women are the least likely to receive loans.
“My aim is to take the pressure off these small businesses by providing a best-in-class ecommerce platform that is built by and for Black people,” says Love-Leigh Trimiew, HellaBlack’s co-founder and CEO. (HellaBlack’s team is composed entirely of Black women.) “There are definitely some out there that are really great and have been trailblazing. But from a UX standpoint, from a customer service standpoint, we saw an opportunity to fill a gap.”
Trimiew says she came up with the idea for HellaBlack in a period of “soul-searching,” during which she’d discovered that her great-great-great-great grandmother was enslaved in Marlboro County, South Carolina. “I felt motivated to truly become my ancestors’ dream, right? You hear that a lot,” she says. “And so I just took a leap of faith. I bought the domain and I was like, ‘we’re doing this.'”
SEE ALSO: How to find and support Black-owned businesses — and why it’s important
In HellaBlack, Trimiew says she sought to create a platform catering specifically to the Black business owner — a platform that doesn’t just host businesses, but also understands and actively promotes them. By creating a destination for Black-owned businesses to reach consumers, Trimiew and her co-founders also wanted to remove the stress Black entrepreneurs face when they work with platforms that can’t — or don’t want to — meet their needs. (A graphic on the HellaBlack website points to how supporting Black-owned businesses can cut the infamous “corporate screw up, then apologize’ cycle.”)
“I’ve worked with small businesses at every level and the same methods just kept coming back,” says co-founder and CMO Layla Nielsen. “They have a website, they have a great product, now what? They just couldn’t figure out how to take it to the next level. So we built the platform that takes all the guessing out of it.”
The three co-founders — Trimiew, Nielsen, and head of supplier relationships Natalie Robinson — grew up in Washington, D.C., where Trimiew’s and Nielsen’s mother, Kelly Tesfaye, and Robinson’s mother, Maze Tesfaye, started — and still co-own — the iconic restaurant and nightclub Twins Jazz. (Kelly and Maze are identical twins.) Robinson is technically Trimiew and Nielsen’s cousin, but the three are so close that they refer to each other as sisters.
“We kind of grew up in marketing,” Nielsen says. “We always joke that we did email marketing before there was email. We were printing out flyers [for the club] and putting them on cars.”
That experience, the co-founders explain, fostered their belief that relationships and trust are what keep customers coming back and business owners fulfilled.
“To this day, musicians who decide to play in Washington, D.C. play at Twins Jazz because they love Kelly and Maze, not because of, you know, this big glamour — because we’re not a big club,” Nielsen says. “We knew right away that relationships are what’s going to drive business, not just for us as founders of HellaBlack, but for those vendors who will be on our platform.”
The co-founders also understand, crucially, that good storytelling is best delivered through solid infrastructure. When imagining the platform, Trimiew says she wanted HellaBlack to be “sleek,” modern-looking, and easy to use across desktop and mobile.
This meant features often seen as “perks” became necessities: A streamlined review system, translation resources, user-friendly shipping calculators, automatic vendor payouts, and plenty of opportunities to be featured on HellaBlack’s social media. On the shopper’s side, there will be editorial features to read about vendors, seller verification badges, and readily available information about vendor policies, among other features.
“I wanted to be able to replicate what a lot of the big marketplaces are doing because I know that they have a big budget to invest in technology,” Trimiew explains. “I’m very proud of the work that [lead UX designer Jeanine White] has done.”
The founders haven’t nailed down a launch date yet, though Trimiew says it’ll definitely be sometime in August, 2020. In the meantime, they’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign with a $50,000 goal. If the goal is met, the funds will be designated to expand marketing operations — including onboarding toolkits for each vendor, an increased ad budget, and an expanded team of buyers.
Vendors interested in joining the platform can fill out a form on the HellaBlack website. Per the company’s media kit, vendors can expect to pay between $0 and $9.99 monthly for membership on the platform, in addition to a 10% sales commission. In turn, HellaBlack plans to donate a percentage of their earnings to businesses in need.
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