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Voices of Tomorrow

Jeena Sharma

retailbrew.com

Voices of Tomorrow is a recurring feature highlighting PoC who are reshaping the retail industry.

Growing up, Ayeshah Abuelhiga—a child of Asian and Middle Eastern immigrant parents—said her family “didn’t have a lot of money.” But if there was one comfort in her life, it was her parents’ carry-out restaurant in Baltimore that served a variety of soul foods.

Abuelhiga dreamed of bringing the same Southern flavors to the world through a fast-casual concept. After a successful pop-up restaurant in Washington, DC, she decided she wanted to expand her crowd-favorite biscuits and waffles to stores across the country. But one look at the modern American frozen food aisle is enough to know most items are full of preservatives and artificial flavors. It’s why in 2014, Abuelhiga decided to revamp the frozen aisle, introducing her Southern frozen treats made with clean ingredients.

“I saw a huge opportunity in the lack of comfort food options available in the growing, better-for-you food space,” Abuelhiga told Retail Brew via email. “I also saw an opportunity to make scratch-made comfort food affordable and accessible to the masses versus just doing better-for-you food in the fine dining realm by looking at the fast-casual scale and ultimately, grocery, as an even better avenue to do just that.”

Today, Mason Dixie products are available across 6,000 stores in the US, including Target, Publix, Kroger, Costco, and Whole Foods, alongside 3,000 Marriott Select Brand Hotels.

According to the company, the multimillion-dollar business has generated 87% dollar growth since 2021.

In a conversation with Retail Brew, Abuelhiga reflected on her success, and her advice to young PoC in retail.

What are some biggest lessons you have learned as a business founder?

The work never gets easier. I used to think it was so hard running the restaurant, doing demos every weekend, getting on emails to cold-call potential grocery stores, and then packaging biscuits until it was time for bed. In fact, my biggest North Star was growing big enough to where I didn’t have to do all those things anymore and somehow it would all happen easier. It’s been 10 years; while I do not do a lot of those things anymore, my days are not any easier. There are new challenges every day—both things that break and need to be fixed and opportunities that present themselves because we have built a reputation that we can solve hard problems, with no playbook. I learned that business is ever-evolving and that nothing actually gets easier; it just gets different.

What are some unique challenges in your job and also as a WoC in the industry?

Every day is new uncharted territory for an emerging brand founder, especially one in a segment like ours where there are not a lot of competitors or gold-standard playbooks for how to make the food we do.

As a WoC in the industry, the challenges are a hundredfold. There are fewer and fewer dollars being allocated to female founders—not just investor dollars, but banking dollars as well. As fewer of us exist, we continue to have the challenge of only a few of us left standing, continuing to give naysayers more data points to say WoC leads less successful businesses because there are mathematically less of us given that chance to succeed.

What advice would you have for young PoC in retail?

I would give them the same advice I give to many of the PoC I mentor whether directly, through the Baltimore CPG Collective, or through our partner nonprofit Project Potluck helping BIPOC, who are vastly underrepresented in the CPG industry, get access to entrepreneurial and career support through network, mentorship and financial programming: Start small. Start where you can impact your destiny and where you can control the most. Don’t envy the brands getting huge volumes of VC money or rolling out to 5,000 doors a year. The most important thing us PoC can do for ourselves is control our destinies, continue to grow sustainably and show off success year after year. I would also say it’s important to stay true to who you are, especially now, as there will be many who want to drag you down. Don’t sacrifice yourself, your values, your North Star, or your vision because someone doesn’t believe it, get it, wants to fund it. There are more ways to win than just the typical route. It takes time, discipline, diligence, and being receptive to the feedback that matters most—your consumer.

Founder of Mason Dixie Foods on changing the American frozen aisle

In an exclusive chat, Ayeshah Abuelhiga reflects on her biggest learnings as business owner and her advice to young PoC in retail.

From BB creams and sheet masks to snail mucin serums, Korean beauty products have created a global following over the years. What was once a niche area of beauty gradually popped up in seemingly every TikTok and YouTube beauty tutorial.

While influencers are definitely key to bringing K-beauty to global prominence, some beauty brands, including Glow Recipe, also played a significant role in making it both more accessible and, well, more fun.

What started out as a curation site for K-beauty products in 2014, soon became a skin care brand with several viral beauty products—namely Watermelon Glow Niacinamide Dew Drops and moisturizer—with 4 million followers globally.

Korean-American co-founders ​Sarah Lee and Christine Chang say that while rooted in Korean heritage, they always wanted Glow Recipe to be a global brand created through hundreds of iterations to suit both Western preferences (non-sticky, lightweight formulations) and Korean inspiration (hydrated, dewy finish).

“By introducing really high-quality, clean formulations, we were able to really engage with our customers and community on the how-tos, all the tips and tricks that we’ve learned from a young age from our mothers and grandmothers, including stories that led to who we were as individuals, but also the passion that we both mutually shared,” Lee told Retail Brew, recalling her decades-long friendship with Chang that ultimately led to the duo going into business together.

Lee and Chang spoke with Retail Brew about how they stay ahead of the competition and their biggest lessons.

What are the biggest lessons you have learned as beauty brand founders?

We try to showcase diverse faces and skin tones and textures on all of our imagery. We don’t retouch, and we have a very stringent real skin acceptance pledge that is for our community, because we know social media can be a very tough place, and we want not only our ecosystem, but also the influencers we work with and the partners we have to not use certain language that not necessarily sets people up for success, like using language like perfect, flawless, poreless, which aren’t realistic. We’ve really, as a team, been thoughtful about all of our touch points and our packaging and our language on our socials.

How did you overcome your biggest initial challenges as two women of color in beauty?

The benefit of living in the current time is that diversity is very much celebrated. I do feel like it’s a very different time than 10 years ago, when we were first starting out. One really important aspect that helped us is finding connections through mentorship and community, and finding your tribe is really important.

Let’s forget about the female factor and ethnicity—being an entrepreneur is very lonely to begin with. Then, to your point, these are some of the other layers of being a female founder. There are so many stats and challenges that are very clear to us; even funding is much harder for women in general. It gets even harder with women of color. So having a good network of like-minded entrepreneurs or executives in the beauty space that have similar backgrounds is really important.

There are connections and real, meaningful relationships and friendships that we were able to foster throughout the last decade. They truly helped us find new opportunities, just mentally uplift each other, and know that you’re not alone as you’re navigating this journey that can actually be really lonely. It is the No. 1 secret that will keep you motivated and excited to be part of this journey.

On that note, what other advice would you give to young WoC aspiring for a career in beauty?

 The other aspect is never losing sight of the vision and the North Star of why you’re doing this. Sometimes as founders, but especially as women of color, you get advice and so many insights and opinions, and sometimes you might want to say “yes” to all of the suggestions that are on the table because they might seem like great opportunities in the beginning, but one of the biggest lessons that we’ve learned throughout our past experiences, is that “yes” is not always the right answer…We’ve really gone through a lot of those moments of having to make some hard decisions. But it all comes down to, is this going to help the vision that I set out when I started the company? Is this going to really help bring me a little closer to the vision that I had established; keep me on track with a brand DNA that I truly believe in and am passionate about; and just staying true to that and staying in that lane? It’s much harder to actually execute on that.

Glow Recipe co-founders Sarah Lee and Christine Chang 

Glow Recipe co-founders’ advice for women of color in beauty

Korean-American co-founders ​Sarah Lee and Christine Chang believe “yes is not always the right answer.”

Glow Recipe co-founders on their biggest learnings and advice for women of color in beauty

Taiwanese-born Tiffany Hsu never set out to “shop for a living,” as she calls it. But the chief buying officer at luxury e-commerce platform Mytheresa has been living a fashion buyer’s dream since graduating from University of the Arts London’s Central Saint Martins with a degree in fashion design in 2003.

After successful stints at Lane Crawford and Selfridges, Hsu joined Mytheresa in 2016 and the rest is history. She currently leads a team of about 30 people and spends time scouting products, attending trade shows, and buying appointments.

Of course, the path to where she is today wasn’t as straightforward. Hsu’s journey started with a “small boutique” in London called Feathers—her first job out of college as she worked her way up. “I started as a shop girl,” she said.

But according to Hsu, she never set out to be a buyer in the first place.

“To be honest, it wasn’t the career path I would’ve chosen for myself, but at the time, I needed a visa, so whoever offered me a job, I took it,” she told Retail Brew.

Hsu said in the beginning, she wasn’t even sure fashion buying was a legitimate job. “Back in the day, fashion buying wasn’t even like a degree; you just study design, or maybe you do merchandising,” she said. “I think it was a very good way to apply both my love for fashion and design and also commerce together.”

Now an industry veteran, Hsu says lots of things have changed for fashion buyers. For starters, the widespread use of social media and smartphones have altered the way people can scout for sources. “I used to have to find things in magazines and in libraries,” she explained. “It’s really hard to know what’s going on around the world, and you’re kind of stuck with what’s given to you. It was very hard to find new things. So, [it’s] really different now, because now everybody has opportunity. Regardless of if you have the resources or the connection, you can put yourself out there for people to see.”

She added that although she works with several big brands, she is easily able to find smaller graduate collections or international brands that weren’t on her radar before simply because things are more accessible today. “I don’t have to find people from trade shows anymore,” she said. “Now I can find people like students who just graduated who probably even haven’t put together their first collection, but I managed to see it. I can contact them.”

But while social media has been instrumental in shaking up lots of industries, the advent of e-commerce has also been a game changer.

“It’s amazing, you know? I lived through the pre-digital era, and obviously I was very young at the time, and fashion was really different; it was very exclusive, elitist, so to speak—it’s for a very niche group of people,” Hsu said. “But now, everyone’s creating their own tribe. Young people are free to express themselves.”

However, despite becoming increasingly accessible, Hsu says the industry is far from perfect—especially for women who are few and far between in the fashion C-suite: “Even in the company I work for, we have executives who are women, but, if you count them, the percentage of men is still higher than [women],” she said, adding that most major brand CEOs are men. “I think us as women need to help other women, because we understand the challenges that we have and stick together.”

MyTheresa Chief Buying Officer Tiffany Hsu

Mytheresa’s chief buying officer on making it in fashion

Tiffany Hsu opens up about the biggest shifts in the industry and the importance of supporting women.

Voices of Tomorrow: Mytheresa’s chief buying officer on making it in fashion and what needs to change

When Manish Chandra, founder and CEO of Poshmark, first immigrated from India to the US in the 1980s, launching a fashion company was hardly on his radar.

Instead, the entrepreneur took on various tech-related roles, including that of a software engineer at Intel, before establishing his own business. After spending extensive time doing a range of jobs in Silicon Valley, he launched his first shopping website, Kaboodle, in 2005, which ultimately led to his founding Poshmark in 2011.

What started out as what he called “a mobile social marketplace built only for the iPhone, targeting only women, and focused only on fashion,” is today one of the top online resale platforms.

But the feat did not come easy. Chandra discussed his personal challenges, his own approach to DE&I, and his advice to younger PoC.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What have been the most unique challenges you've faced in your career?

It has been a journey of really understanding and embedding myself in the culture, understanding the American consumer, which is always evolving. That’s a huge challenge, right? To understand people who are like you, but also people who are quite different from you, and how do you sort of tap into it? That’s one key challenge.

Second is, we have a value in our company, which is “embrace your weirdness.” It is almost embracing whatever sets you apart, whether it’s your brownness, whether it's being a male or it’s being a female or being a person who doesn’t identify as a male or female, whatever it is that sets you apart, whatever your interests are leading into it as sources of strength, but they are also sometimes sources of challenge.

One of the things that I had not anticipated is that, as I went from being a tech person, an enterprise person, going to consumer, is many of the investors would look at me and say, ‘We would invest in him if he was doing a database company or software company, but fashion—there’s no way we can invest in Manish.’ And that was a huge challenge I faced, which is weird, because it was almost like being a man and being a man who was not really that fashionable. I’ve probably become more fashionable over time, but having good insights was a big challenge.

What's the best way for companies to approach DE&I?

We are all very different, but we are also all very similar. The key is to really enhance the similarity and respect while embracing the differences. We all want to be loved and respected. If you’re coming to work, we want to get paid well. We want to grow in our career. 

That desire is universal, no matter who you are. But if you’re a woman, if you’re a man, if you’re a woman of color, if you’re a man of color, if you’re not even of color—if you’re in these different buckets, you may feel that everyone is very similar, or even when people look similar, they are similar. 

But the truth is, depending upon where you are in the world, sometimes people who look different are more similar, and sometimes people who look the same can be quite different. So understanding that uniqueness and then giving people a way to be themselves is very important in any community. To me, DE&I is embracing the differences, but then allowing the similarities to flourish despite the differences, and that is sort of what we get focused on in our core values and our principles and in how we build everything.

What advice do you have for young PoC in retail?

Find your tribe and find your community, which could be from people who look like you or people who think like you and be open to both the possibilities in the world, but then at the same time, follow the core principles in success, which is always have a curious mind, always be willing to work hard. 

No. 2, find mentors who are genuinely interested in your success, and work with them and truly be open to that feedback. And the third thing is really make sure that you’re leading in and understanding everyone, as opposed to just yourself, because at the end, you want to have a success that’s bigger than any niche that you can grow in. So to me, it is always connecting to the broadest set of people out there.

Walmart Business

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Poshmark CEO on being the unlikely leader of a thriving fashion business

 In an exclusive conversation with Retail Brew, Manish Chandra opens up about his biggest challenges and his own vision of diversity.

Voices of Tomorrow: Poshmark CEO on being the unlikely leader of a thriving fashion business

As Covid lockdowns went into effect around the world in 2020, Joanne Wilson, a seasoned angel investor with more than 

 in her investment portfolio, found herself burned out and bored.

It was right around then that the push to legalize recreational cannabis in New York was getting hot, and it intrigued Wilson. That was more or less the beginning of New York’s premier cannabis dispensary and lifestyle store, 

 which is set to open three more stores in NYC over the next couple of months.

The company is particularly dedicated to supporting marginalized communities through its partnerships with nonprofits like 

, which will directly serve Black and other communities of color disproportionately affected by systemically oppressive cannabis laws.

Wilson opened up to Retail Brew about her work with Gotham, and the challenges that still exist for PoC in retail and entrepreneurship.

One of the things that sets us apart is we are a premier brand with a very different experience when you walk in that door. It is not about just executing on that purchase, but also in terms of the kind of company that is very important to me to build. We pay people 25 bucks an hour. We also give you four weeks of vacation. We pay for your healthcare. You don’t have to buy into it if you’re full time. When we grow as a company and there are jobs that are available, the first place we post is internally, so there’s opportunity to move up. There’s also a pool of profit, profits that [go] back to the employees, and we’ll continue at each store individually, so that you know many of these employees have the ability to make life-changing money for themselves and their families. We also are starting a monthly curriculum to help our employees think about how they put their money into banks or they put it into bonds, or how they should be thinking about their finances, and then teaching them about marketing, or teaching about buying Google AdWords—just things that they don’t understand what maybe we’re doing at the executive level, but to allow them to understand that. Because if you don’t see it, you can’t be it.

What kind of challenges still exist for PoC and WoC in retail?

I think there will be challenges for PoC and women for a long, long, long time. I think that the more women and PoC who have success, and turn back around to pull up the others behind them to help them succeed…it will become just normal. And certainly, if Kamala [Harris] becomes president, which I fully believe that she will be, I hope that through her success, we will see changes and young people saying, “Well, I can be it, if she can be it.” And now it’s there. For so long in our country, we have done nothing but bad things to groups of people to keep them down, even if you think about and you look through pictures of Black communities during the ’50s or ’60s or ’70s, they were living the same life as the white communities, but they weren’t in the media. They weren’t in magazines. It was almost like they were behind closed doors. And that needs to stop.

What kind of changes would you like to see from the executive level?

It is important for anyone to make an effort to be diverse. For instance, there have been CEOs and founders who have said, “Listen, I’m having a really hard time finding a woman for this job.” I was like, “Well, guess what? If you only interview women, it won’t be that hard, right? Or if you’re like, “You know what, we are not looking diverse enough. Whoever we hire next, better be someone of color. If it takes us twice as long, so be it.”

That’s one of the things that’s the beauty of Gotham, because it is such a unique space, and it’s not just retail; it’s cannabis and retail. So we are such a cast of characters that all come from such different walks of life. The reality is that is what’s going to make that successful because everyone comes from somewhere else.

Gotham founder on doing the work that matters

Seasoned investor and founder of the cannabis dispensary and lifestyle store Joanne Wilson.

Voices of Tomorrow: Gotham founder on doing the work that matters

Logistics is an integral albeit slightly overlooked part of retail that pretty much determines how efficiently a brand functions. As a longtime retail entrepreneur, Ricky Choi understands that.

After spending years working for brands, including as CEO at apparel and accessories brand Nice Laundry, he now heads up the logistics brand Outerspace that works with retailers such as Hill House, Thesis, and of course Nice Laundry.

Choi, who is both a co-founder and CEO at the tech-forward, e-commerce-focused company, founded Outerspace to address some of the pain points he experienced working with retailers. And you know what they say: If you want something done well, you’ve got to do it yourself. And that’s more or less what Choi did.

Speaking with Retail Brew, the industry veteran discussed his journey from brands to logistics, challenges facing people of color in retail, and why it’s important to set high standards for yourself in the industry.

As a brand founder at Nice Laundry, someone who is probably pretty naive and ignorant to what warehousing and logistics is, we worked with a lot of third-party warehouses, and we would ask a lot of questions to them that they probably rolled their eyes. “Why can’t we do it this way? Why can’t we have someone there on site during these hours to check out?” It was always no, no, no. So finally, we said, “Let’s bring it in-house. Let’s do it ourselves. Let’s build it exactly the way that we want to.” About a year into that, we started getting calls from other brands: “Hey, how are you able to promise this sort of turnaround to the customer?” Or, “I placed an order from your site the other day, and the customer service person seemed like they were walking around at the warehouse. Who are you working with?” Because those are all the things that we’ve always wanted. Finally, after getting calls for months and months, we said, “Let’s take on a few brands, see if we can unlock the same synergies for their businesses that we did for ours,” and were very successful, and decided to spin that out into what is now Outerspace.

When you’re a minority in the industry and you’re in the room and you’re having the big discussion, there is just, subtly, a little bit of a higher bar that you have to clear because people aren’t necessarily used to seeing PoC or a minority, and there’s kind of some trust that you have to build…The way that you can build the most trust is by just having very high goals, building a very legitimate, merit-based company that speaks for itself. So the fact that you are a PoC or a minority becomes a little bit of a secondary factor.

There’s a lot of advice out there specifically targeted toward PoC that would say something along the lines of “Build communities. Reach out to those who look like you or who may have a similar cultural background. Look inward and build a groundswell, and slowly but surely build something off of that.” I think that’s phenomenal advice. So I’m not going to echo that, but I will say something that is probably approaching it from a little bit of a different angle, which is, as a PoC, I think the world around you is going to tell you to do it a certain way, kind of slow and steady. I think the opposite. I think if you are a PoC, hold yourself to the highest standard, constantly try to do things on the biggest stage or at the biggest level, or work with the biggest partners. To a certain extent, it is unexpected. If you hold yourself to this incredibly high standard time and time again, I think you end up at a very interesting place.

Outerspace CEO Ricky Choi on setting the bar high

In an exclusive chat with Retail Brew, the CEO of the logistics company talks about his journey in retail and the challenges facing PoC today.

Voices of Tomorrow: Outerspace CEO Ricky Choi on the importance of setting the bar high

As a brand that’s been around for 30 years, Coyuchi has established itself as a purveyor of sustainable home textiles with everything from organic bedding to bathrobes.

The retailer has also expanded into areas like home decor and kitchen linens in recent years. At its operational helm is COO Marcus Chung, who joined two years ago and has since taken on projects like integrating secondhand products into its site.

Prior to Coyuchi, Chung also worked at retailers such as The Children’s Place, Stitch Fix, and ThirdLove.

In an exclusive with Retail Brew, Chung opened up about his work at Coyuchi, how the home goods industry has changed, and the challenges PoC in the industry face.

How do you feel the home goods industry has changed in recent years alongside the focus on sustainability?

I think [sustainability] has definitely become a trend. You see more and more brands talk about “organic” in particular, or different sustainable materials. There’s a customer out there who absolutely cares about sustainability and impact. We consider ourselves to be differentiated in a few ways. One is that we’re very focused on certifications. So I don’t know how many brands can say that they’re GOTS, which is the global organic textile standard. That’s a degree of rigor that’s really hard to achieve and really requires you to look at not only your supply chain, but also your own operations. Last month, we had our auditor come on site and look at our headquarters to make sure that our practices and how we treat our own employees is consistent with their standards. So it’s not an easy certification. 

But for the consumer, that’s one way they can tell that the company or brand is really doing what they claim to be doing. Because there’s so much opportunity in the supply chain for people to claim one thing, but the practices aren’t actually happening.

What challenges do people of color in the retail industry face?

Early on in my career, and this is probably true for many PoC, is that you didn’t see a lot of other PoC in leadership roles. So it was hard to understand what behavior needed to be modeled…You just didn’t have a ton of examples to be able to learn from. I do think that the numbers probably still support that there’s opportunity for more PoC to be elevated to executive roles. That is part of the challenge. The second is mentorship, whether formally or informally, isn’t as strong maybe even in retail than in other industries. I have friends in other industries who talked about really formal mentor networks or relationships—in tech, and in healthcare—but I’m not sure retail has that same sort of sense of mentorship. I think there’s an opportunity for that.

What needs to change in the way the industry functions to create more opportunities for PoC?

There’s a few different ways to look at it. One is even in sort of a structural way that recruiting and talent development happens. Many more companies are starting to really look at their recruiting practices to see if they may be unintentionally excluding certain PoC from applying for jobs because they might not even see that they fit in when they read a job description. But I would even say that from my own experience, like culturally, my parents immigrated from Hong Kong. I am first generation and they didn’t work in big companies. So just trying to understand things like how do you show up in a professional environment when you haven’t seen that from your parents or other people, and just learning the vernacular like what to wear sometimes can be so challenging.

Especially being Asian American, you’re just taught to be like, “Don’t rock the boat.” You want to come in and make sure that you’re not causing too much trouble. I would encourage people—especially PoC, especially Asian Americans—to not be afraid of taking up space. That’s really hard for someone who’s been raised a certain way where that is not necessarily valued to be able to come into a meeting and feel that their voice is equally as important as the other people around the table. I will admit that that’s still something that I struggle with every day. But it’s definitely something that, for Asian Americans in particular, is important to be able to succeed in a corporate environment, where it’s important to get many perspectives to make decisions.