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Black consumers in the U.S.
Black consumers in the U.S. command about $2 trillion in buying power. Black-owned companies with employees are 3.4% of U.S. employer firms, and Black brands took 2.5% of U.S. beauty revenue in 2021. Episode 1 of At The Margins follows the money from the checkout line to the balance sheet, in the U.S. and Canada, and traces how four of the best-known Black-founded beauty brands were sold to L'Oréal, Unilever and P&G.
What we cover
Chapters
(0:00) Cold open
(0:39) The gap
(4:42) The shelf
(6:26) The exit
(9:43) The balance sheet
(10:21) The evidence
(12:57) The bottom line
(13:17) The bottom line
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At The Margins is a Black Executive Journal investigative series on the hidden economics of Black business in the United States and Canada: who owns it, who funds it, who profits from it, and who will own it next.
At The Margins is a BEJ original series on the hidden economics of Black business in the United States and Canada: who owns it, who funds it, who profits from it, and who will own it next.
Black consumers in the United States spend about two trillion dollars a year. That's NIQ's estimate for 2026, and it makes Black America one of the largest consumer markets in the world. But spending is only half of the story. The other half is who's on the receiving end of that money, and how much of it stays with the people who created the market in the first place. That's the question this episode asks.
From the Black Executive Journal, this is At The Margins. In this first episode, Built Here, Owned Elsewhere, we follow the money from the checkout line to the balance sheet.
Let's start with who owns the businesses.
About fourteen percent of Americans are Black. The Census Bureau's most recent count of business owners, which it published last November, covers 2023. And that year, Black-owned companies made up just three point four percent of American businesses with employees. That's out of roughly five point nine million firms.
But that's not the whole picture. Most Black-owned businesses don't have any employees at all. They're sole proprietors, freelancers, people running a business on the side. There were about four point four million of them in 2023, which is fourteen point four percent of every business like that in the country. That's right in line with the population. So the gap doesn't show up when people start working for themselves. It shows up when they start hiring.
And on that front, things are moving. In 2020 there were about a hundred and forty-one thousand Black-owned employer firms. By 2023 there were about two hundred and one thousand. That's an increase of around forty-three percent in just three years.
Stretch the window back further and it's even more striking. The Brookings Institution looked at the Census data from 2017 to 2023. Over that time, the number of Black-owned employer firms grew by about sixty-two percent. The number of employer firms across the whole country grew by about three percent.
Revenue grew even faster. These firms took in a hundred and forty-one billion dollars in 2020, and two hundred and forty-nine billion in 2023, before inflation. That's an increase of about seventy-six percent, and it averages out to roughly one point two million dollars in sales for each company.
They're also a real source of jobs. In 2023, Black-owned employer firms supported more than one point eight million of them, and paid out nearly seventy billion dollars in wages.
Now, it's worth putting the two big numbers next to each other, with one caveat. They don't measure the same thing. Buying power is what Black households spend. Business receipts are what Black-owned companies sell, to customers of every background. Still, the difference in scale tells you something. On one side, a market worth around two trillion dollars. On the other, Black-owned employer firms bringing in about a quarter of a trillion.
There's something else you should know about these numbers, and it's very recent. On October twenty-second, the Census Bureau proposed taking six questions out of its next Annual Business Survey. They're the ones that ask owners about their race, ethnicity, sex, place of birth, citizenship and age. Instead, the bureau says it would estimate those figures from administrative records. The public has until December twenty-first to comment. And this is the same survey behind every American figure you've heard so far.
Across the border, Canada follows a similar pattern. In the 2021 census, four point three percent of Canadians were Black. In 2022, Statistics Canada counted almost a hundred and eighty thousand Black-owned businesses, which works out to two point eight percent of the total. And those businesses received two point two percent of the federal government's support for business innovation and growth. That's about ninety-three million dollars.
Ottawa's main answer has been a dedicated loan fund. It's run by the Federation of African Canadian Economics, a coalition of Black-led organizations, together with the Business Development Bank of Canada. According to the federation, the fund has approved sixty-seven million dollars in loans so far, and paid out about fifty million of that to nearly six hundred Black-owned businesses. Last October, the government renewed the broader program through 2030, with up to a hundred and eighty-nine million dollars. Up to sixty-seven million of that is for the next round of the loan fund.
So if Black consumers are spending all that money, where does it actually go? To answer that, look at the shelf.
NIQ tracks what American households buy. In 2025, Black households made up thirteen point one percent of all U.S. households, and they accounted for eleven percent of the money spent on the everyday goods NIQ measures.
Beauty is where the gap is easiest to see. McKinsey's study of the industry is still the most detailed one available. It found that in 2021, Black consumers were responsible for eleven point one percent of everything Americans spent on beauty. But Black-owned brands earned just two point five percent of the industry's revenue.
Put in dollars, Black consumers spent around six point six billion that year, while Black-owned brands brought in about one point five billion, from customers of every background. And McKinsey found something else. Among forty-five Black beauty brands it studied, nine were no longer Black-owned. Those nine accounted for eighty-two percent of the group's revenue.
Part of the problem is simply getting onto the shelf. A small number of retail buyers decide what millions of shoppers will see. In June 2020, the designer Aurora James started the Fifteen Percent Pledge. It asks retailers to give Black-owned brands a share of their shelf space that matches the Black share of the population. Sephora was the first major retailer to sign on. By April 2025, the organization said it had twenty-nine active partners, and that close to fourteen billion dollars in revenue had shifted to Black-owned companies. Target, which pulled back on its diversity commitments in 2025, never signed.
And for the Black brands that did make it big, the real question is what happened next.
Over the past decade, several of the best-known Black-founded beauty and hair care companies were bought by the biggest consumer goods companies in the world, including L'Oréal, Unilever and Procter and Gamble. In none of these deals was the price made public.
Take Carol's Daughter. Lisa Price started it in 1993. By the time L'Oréal USA agreed to buy it in October 2014, the brand was bringing in twenty-seven million dollars a year in net sales.
Then there's Sundial Brands, the company behind SheaMoisture. In 2015, its founder, Richelieu Dennis, sold a minority stake to Bain Capital, and the family kept majority ownership. Two years later, in November 2017, Unilever agreed to buy the whole company, including Nubian Heritage and the Madam C.J. Walker line. Dennis stayed on to run it as a separate unit, and as part of the deal, a fifty-million-dollar fund was set up for entrepreneurs who are women of color.
In December 2018, Procter and Gamble bought Walker and Company, the maker of Bevel shaving products. Its founder, Tristan Walker, had raised more than thirty-three million dollars from venture capital investors. After the sale, the company became a wholly owned subsidiary of P and G, and Walker stayed on as chief executive.
Mielle Organics took a very similar route. In April 2021, its founders, Monique and Melvin Rodriguez, brought in the private equity firm Berkshire Partners as an investor, while keeping majority control. Twenty-one months later, in January 2023, Procter and Gamble bought the company. The two founders stayed on to run it.
You can see a pattern here. In two of these cases, the first outside money came from private equity, as a minority stake, with the founders still in control. And both times, within about two years, the entire company was sold to a global buyer. That's actually a common path for consumer brands. Private investors put money in to fund growth, and eventually they need to get their money out. The buyers who can pay the most are the global companies that already own the factories, the distribution networks and the relationships with retailers. So the brand ends up where that infrastructure already is.
By any normal standard, each of these was a success. A founder built something valuable enough for a global company to buy it. These sales very likely made those founders wealthy, though because the terms were kept private, we don't know by how much. What changed hands was the equity, meaning the right to everything the brand earns from here on.
One of those brands has since come back. In March 2025, L'Oréal USA sold Carol's Daughter to a new partnership led by an independent beauty entrepreneur. Lisa Price came back as president, and she has an equity stake. So thirty-two years after she started the company, she's an owner again.
But that return is an exception, and it actually makes the rule easier to see. For most of the last decade, the most successful Black-founded brands in this category ended up as assets of companies based in Paris, London and Cincinnati.
So let's draw up the balance sheet.
On the asset side, there's the market itself, about two trillion dollars in spending power. On the liability side, there's how little of the ownership is Black: three point four percent of American employer firms, two point eight percent of Canadian businesses, and two point five percent of beauty revenue. As for the equity in several of the most successful Black-founded brands, it now sits on the books of global corporations. And whoever holds the equity holds the control.
So what has actually worked to keep ownership in Black hands? Here, we're only looking at things with a documented track record.
The first is founders who sell one company going on to buy another back. Essence magazine was founded as a Black-owned publication. In 2000, the publisher Time Inc. bought forty-nine percent of it, and in 2005 it bought the rest. Then in January 2018, about two months after he agreed to sell Sundial to Unilever, Richelieu Dennis bought Essence from Time Inc. through his new company, Essence Ventures. The magazine went back to being fully Black-owned, and its senior executives were given equity stakes. One founder, one exit, and two months later, a major Black media brand back in Black ownership.
The second is that big companies sell brands, too. When a conglomerate decides a brand isn't a good fit anymore, it puts it up for sale. That's what happened with Carol's Daughter, and because its founder had a financial partner ready, she was able to buy back in. These opportunities go to whoever has the money lined up at the moment the seller decides.
The third is sharing ownership with employees before a company is ever sold. The evidence here is more limited. In 2019, researchers at Rutgers surveyed about two hundred lower- and middle-income workers at twenty-one companies with employee stock ownership plans. Among the Black men in that study, the typical retirement account from the plan was worth a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. For Black women, it was thirty-two thousand. For comparison, the typical single Black worker in America had just a few hundred dollars in total wealth. That's a small study, and it compares two different groups of people, so it can't prove cause and effect. A much larger study, from Morehouse College, Project Equity and the University of California, Riverside, came out this year, but its findings on Black workers haven't been released yet.
And research suggests the gap starts on day one. The economists Robert Fairlie, Alicia Robb and David Robinson followed nearly five thousand businesses that opened in 2004, all the way through 2011. In their first year, Black-owned startups had about thirty-five thousand dollars in total funding, on average. White-owned startups had about a hundred and seven thousand. The difference in outside loans was even bigger: roughly eleven thousand dollars, compared with fifty-seven thousand. The Black-owned startups started out smaller and stayed smaller. And their founders were less likely to apply for loans at all, mostly because they expected to be turned down, even when their credit was good.
That brings us back to the question behind every one of these sales. Founders sell for lots of reasons, but growing a business takes capital, and capital always comes with conditions. Before Mielle had a buyer, it had a private equity investor. So did Sundial. Walker and Company started with venture capital.
On Wednesday on At The Margins, we look at the capital stack. Who's funding Black business, where along the way the money dries up, and what's been shown to change that.
You've been watching At The Margins, from the Black Executive Journal. New episodes every Monday and Wednesday, at black executive brief dot com.