On March 19th, our state's governor ordered all personal care services to close their doors until further notice. As the owner of a hair salon and extension bar, I feared the thought of closing our doors and losing income but felt it was the right and responsible decision to assist our community in stopping the spread of COVID-19. Never in all my thoughts did I think we would remain closed for three months.
Growing up in Benac, a small village in the South of France, my parents instilled the importance of natural and healthy living in me from a young age. My father is a white French man and my mother is an African-American, so as the only mixed family in the village, I always felt... different. I was an average, tall, skinny, curly-haired girl, who watched the Miss France competition every year, dreaming of the gorgeous gowns, the pretty girls and the luxurious destiny that awaited them.
How can we help overcome the national health crisis and allow people access to nutritious food on a regular basis? It's a question I've been driven to answer since 2009, catalyzed by one of the scariest scenarios a daughter can imagine - the health crisis of a parent.
It seemed like everything happened overnight because, well… it did. One moment, my team and I were business as usual, running a multi-million-dollar edible cookie dough company I built from scratch in my at-home kitchen five years ago and the next we were sitting in an emergency management team meeting asking ourselves, "What do we do now?" Things had escalated in New York, and we were all called to do our part in "flattening the curve" and "slowing the spread."
It's absurdly difficult to launch a product for women, by women. When I moved to NYC, I was bright and full of dreams, my hopes pinned on a colorful career and exciting new friends. Within one year, exciting new friends in tow, I was fully engaged in learning the ropes and climbing the ladder at a global investment banking firm. It was an exciting time of learning new things and my capacity for growth was enormous.