COVER STORY: BLACK ENTREPRENEURS
Talking shop
Black entrepreneurs, especially women, face extra challenges
by Kate Andrews C
haris Jones, by any measure, is a major success. Her online retail brand, Sassy
Jones, was the top-ranking Virginia business on the 2020 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing U.S. private companies, based on its 2019 growth. The Richmond- based fashion accessories and beauty e-commerce company reaped $14 million in revenue last year, three-and-a-half times its revenue from the previous year. In 2021, Jones plans to roll out new cosmetics, clothing, shoe and home décor lines. “We’re just waiting to see how good it
can get,” she says. But when she was starting out in 2013, Jones had to sell her Mercedes C320 for $3,200 to launch her business. She didn’t bother to seek a bank loan because she didn’t think she’d be approved. Black women helm 42% of new
women-owned businesses nationally and 36% of all new Black-owned businesses, according to 2018 U.S. Census data. And their companies are uniquely vulnerable in this economic climate. One major issue is lack of financial
resources. A JPMorgan Chase & Co. Institute study released in September 2019 found that small businesses in majority- Black communities were unlikely to be able to pay two weeks’ worth of bills with cash on hand. The roots of Black entrepreneurship are deep, however, tracing back centuries
Photo by Caroline Martin
Charis Jones, founder of Sassy Jones, started her online fashion retail business in 2013 with money she got from selling her car. The company brought in $14 million in revenue last year.
to enslaved people who used their skills to purchase their freedom and start small businesses. By the dawn of the 20th century,
Maggie Lena Walker became the first Black woman in the United States to charter and run a bank: Richmond’s St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. “Let us have a bank that will take the nickels and
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turn them into dollars,” Walker said in 1901. Richmond was the home for other Black-owned banks that started in the late 1800s and early 1900s, providing financial services for Black clients whose business wasn’t welcome at white banks. “Black people — and Black women
especially — are shut out of traditional employment, but our culture applauds
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