Those businesses tend to be smaller on average than male businesses, financed at a lower rate, less profitable, slower to grow, and more likely to be based at home and in female-centric industries, such as beauty (all hands-on, in-person businesses that are particularly hard hit by the economic fallout of Covid-19). A 2016 Kauffman Foundation report on gender and entrepreneurship found that women are half as likely as their male counterparts to start a new business. The more complicated news is that black women and other minorities, like women overall, face greater hurdles to becoming entrepreneurs and succeeding at entrepreneurship over the long term. These women stand out as a group whose entrepreneurial ambitions are backed up by their willingness to put those ideas into action and actually go into business for themselves. However, African Americans don’t drive that demographic shift in the same way Asian Americans or Latinos do through immigration their numbers as a percentage of the US population are relatively steady.
Part of the growth in minority entrepreneurship is due to the demographic shift around America, as immigration changes the face of the workforce and nation. He personally convinced her to start selling products when she was a hairstylist, launching her from one of the many African American women with a salon in New Orleans, into a nationally recognized figure in the black hair community, with a rapidly growing multimillion-dollar business. “That shit won’t work!”ĭupart is conflicted, because the man behind these mess-ups was her mentor in the business. We went from having a two-day turnover to 12 days,” she says, flipping between her two phones and her computer. “A mess-up now costs thousands of dollars, where just a few months ago it was a few hundred. “We don’t have room for error,” she tells me, as she sits behind her desk at the company’s office, which occupies a few units of the strip mall where her salon had once been. The company in Houston that manufactured and distributed Kaleidoscope’s products simply couldn’t handle the speed and volume of the scale, and these problems were irritating Dupart. In 2018, Kaleidoscope’s growth exploded, with sales going from $100,000 a month at the start of the year, to $1 million by the end of March. Her hair was straight and black (one of many extensions she rotates through each week), and her fingernails on this day are nearly 3-inch-long glittering gold, purple, black, and jeweled talons. This morning she is wearing a pair of Adidas workout tights, Yeezy sneakers, and a bejeweled T-shirt that says Pray Girl, Pray. “If I knew what I was doing was going to be hair, I probably would have changed it,” Dupart says about the handle, with a grin.
“BB” stood for Big Booty, a God-given asset that Dupart wasn’t shy about deploying in the steady stream of photos and videos she cranked out around the clock in the service of her business. All of that was driven by Dupart’s relentless marketing on social media, particularly Instagram, where her handle was about to gain its millionth follower.ĭupart stands little more than 5 feet tall, with big eyes and a wide smile. Salons and beauty supply stores in every state, as well as Canada, the Caribbean, and the UK, sold its products. Jesseca Dupart started Kaleidoscope as a simple hair salon in the northeastern section of New Orleans, called Little Woods, back in 2012, when she was 30 years old, and by the time I visited her six years later, Kaleidoscope was a rapidly growing brand in the African American beauty market.
Excerpted from The Soul of an Entrepreneur by David Sax.
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