Black Beauty Closures Are Not Your Cautionary Tale
What I hate most about the Ami Cole news
Diarrha N'Diaye-Mbaye, founder of the beauty brand Ami Colé via The Cut
Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye, founder of Ami Colé announced the closure of her makeup brand and mother’s namesake, yesterday via The Cut. My kind of carrying on.
Within the hour of the article going live, beauty pages, editors and influencers were posting branded carousels, green screen videos, reflections, and bullet-point summaries. I’m thinking to myself, how did everyone manage to write grammatically perfect copy and get their assets up within the hour? Lol.
On cue, Black BeautyTok and Instagram were in eulogy mode.
As Slutty Founder was probably one of the few media outlets that was not included in the pre-coordinated rollout that was the announcement of Ami Colé closure, I have the luxury of sharing a few honest thoughts, and there are many, as you know.
Maybe I’m just overly sensitive, but as someone who shut down a beauty brand gleefully only to be met with condolences, pity, and a public response didn’t match my IRL peace, this brought up for me how unavoidable that narrative is. You know the one, bc I’m always talking about it. Whenever I see it, it infuriates me.
Once a Black-owned brand shuts down, it manages to become a teachable moment for systemic failure.
Whether you push back on the narrative or choose to lean into it, our closures always seem to get flattened into a tidy headline about what we’re up against and how we didn’t stand a chance. Ask me how I fucking know.
Any media literate person knows that stories about Black women overcoming or being failed by the system reliably go viral. But, I’m bored of the ouroboros of an ecosystem that feeds on these tropes while keeping us stuck in the first place.
We’ve wrung this story out and I’m fucking sick of it.
Let’s talk about Agency
I also worry about how quickly we’re willing to claim someone else’s outcome as our personal cautionary tale. As a friend put it best when we were chatting earlier on the matter, people don’t seem to realize there are a million different outcomes between crashing into zero and exiting for a billion. Unfortunately, toxic founder culture only presents us those two binaries — win big or die trying.
In her Cut article, Diarrha wrote that she rode a temperamental wave of appeasing investors, while riding unpredictable moments of social media buzz and celebrity mentions—compounded by the brutal economics of retail.
Still Diarrha has raised across multiple rounds, landing over $3M in institutional capital (including investments from L'Oréal's Venture arm and angel investments from The Cut’s own Lindsay Peoples Wagner and Hannah Bronfman). She made it into all Sephora doors and won 80+ awards, before her decision to sunset the brand.
I understand we’re interpreting her ending as a case study in how the industry fails Black beauty founders because that’s the story she providing, and it is totally her right to claim that as her truth. But the ambiguity in her essay signaled to me that Diarrha may have been more done with the business than most are picking up on.
The Vibe Shift of Victimhood
I’m always leary of talking about the challenges of the post DEI market, because the gatekeepers that we’re begging to see us, literally don’t give a fuck. You think they’re unaware of the stats?
Everytime this discourse kicks up again I think, here we are again, right where they want us. On our knees, while driving clicks and views (and hopefully for Ami Colé, sales).
Stand uppp. Before we all get hyperpigmentation and need some Topicals.
Ami Cole rode the wave during BLM better than many of us did. Diarrha even wrote that some of the same investors who told her “no” in 2019 came crawling back in 2020 to help bring her “deserving brand” to life (unsurprising). But once they were in, she was left navigating the founder journey without tactical support, only to have those same stakeholders shift the terms once DEI fell out of vogue.
Unfortunately, the fickleness of white saviorhood is not strong enough to anchor a company long term or create Product Market Fit.
Diarrha wrote that continuing in this market “wasn’t sustainable” which sounds like a sober realization of investor mismatch and shifting expectations within such a volatile landscape more than injustice. At the end of the day, it was probably best for her to call it. Even the most phenomenal product can’t survive a hyper-dependent market without aligned money behind it.
My Problem With The Victimhood Strategy
Maybe I’m just hypervigilant because during my own closure, I was unknowingly and horrifically made a part of the same kind of narrative when Business of Fashion insidiously ran a Glossier backed piece that positioned them as benevolent investor as part of the rollout for their latest Grant Initiative—all while leveraging my brand’s closure to prove a point I didn’t acquiesce to. I was even aggressively misquoted! It is something I’ve never recovered my anger from (God forgives, I don’t!!!!) why I refuse to speak with BOF to this day, and why you will rarely see me mention Glossier anywhere on my platform.
Because of this traumatizing experience, I can now clock PR-engineered victim strategy right away, even when it appears well meaning and whether it’s the truth or not. Put the words Black, investors, funding and closing in a sentence and it will spark sales-worthy discourse. It’s literal engagement farming off of Black pain, and we fall for it time and time again.
When does the buck stop?
The truth is, Diarrha has accomplished more than many of us could even dream in her brand’s four short years. This isn’t to discount what she names her challenges to have been, but to recognize, that by all accounts, she is exceptional. She built something gorgeous and necessary, raised a handful of millions and shut it down to an outpouring of love and support (as she deserves).
And frankly, I respect that no one’s asking what she did with all that money she raised. Maybe we’re getting closer to equitable privilege than we think.
Here are some messages I’ve received yesterday regarding the Ami Colé closure:
“They don’t let black beauty brands win.”
“Black beauty brands are dropping like flies.”
“It feels like it could be any of us next.” (many messages like this, actually).
“This is scary.”
I say this with love, you guys, but please get a grip. Do not use this moment as your excuse to spiral.
The truth is there ARE and remain MANY successful Black-owned brands quietly crushing it out in the world. They’re just not in the spotlight because they likely don’t fit the algorithm of virality or legible victimhood. If attention is your biggest form of capital, then sure by that standard you might write those brands off as irrelevant. But don’t confuse stealth with unsuccessful.
And please stop measuring your success against the curated outcomes of white women–owned brands. You’re letting the system bait you into thinking the only wins that matter are the ones that look like theirs. The gag is most of them don’t have it all figured out either. Their brands close due to funding failures too. Even Hailey Beiber is an outlier. So stop comparing yourselves to the exception, not the norm.
Kudos to the strategically orchestrated closing comms strategy, engineered by the Ami Colé team, although I do wish they went with a different narrative.
Nonetheless, I’m happy to welcome Diarrha to the Black Beauty Closure Club. It’s quite lovely over here!
xx,
SF
Per usual! Stunning and lovely and eloquent
This is everything everyone wouldn’t say and I such a good angle of the situation not discussed.