Earlier this week, controversy came for the Lip Bar, the Black-owned beauty brand founded by Melissa Butler. During an Adweek panel, the Lip Bar’s vice-president of marketing, Yasmine H. Parrish, discussed the company’s strategic efforts to broaden its consumer base at Target — beyond its core demographic of Black millennial women — to offset sales declines at the retailer. This comment sparked online backlash from consumers questioning whether the Lip Bar was distancing itself from the community that had anchored its original success. Users on Threads were quick to sound off: “This perspective comes off as the Black woman’s dollar/purchase isn’t enough,” “My last TLB purchase was my LAST purchase. I hope your non Black millennial customers got you.”
Further spurring the reactions was the controversy surrounding Target itself: The retailer’s decision to dismantle its multibillion-dollar diversity, equity, and inclusion goals last year — a move that left many Black consumers feeling deeply betrayed — has resulted in ongoing boycott efforts. This week, Butler jumped into the digital trenches to manage her brand’s narrative, replying to posts and defending her 14-year track record. “The Lip Bar has been critical of Target,” she wrote. “It’s not lost on us that what they did and continue to do is wrong. As the CEO, I have been publicly critical of them.” Elsewhere, she shared why the brand “cannot simply exit Target” and expressed why she believes “we should try hard to stop being so unnecessarily critical to Black-owned businesses. A Black brand selling to non-Black people is not anti-Black.”
In a separate reply, she laid bare the emotional tax of the immediate pile-on: “Truthfully, my nervous system isn’t set up for this. I’m getting older and the world is getting colder.”
When I reached out to Butler for comment, she was in the middle of preparing for a board meeting; she shared that everything she wanted to say could be found in her replies. But then she texted back. “I’m a fighter,” she wrote. “And I found the time to respond to the comments. Because you don’t get to create narratives and run with them. Not about what I built for you. And for us.”
Being a fighter, as Butler put it to me, has come to define the nearly impossible-to-navigate path of modern Black entrepreneurship. Given the systemic issues facing Black founders, how can we scale our companies to survive in a business environment that is (and has been) inhospitable to us? And if we want to serve Black communities — which many of us do — is it possible to do so while trying to scale?
As a Black founder myself, I felt grieved and exhausted reading the comments about the Lip Bar. It seemed to me that commenters had misconstrued a standard business strategy, interpreting it instead as an abandonment of the brand’s core audience. And I was frustrated to observe yet another internet uproar coming for a Black-owned brand.
The Lip Bar’s drama is just the latest instance of a troubling trend. The examples abound: Ami Colé, the clean-beauty brand founded by Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye, closed permanently in September 2025, a decision N’Diaye-Mbaye explained in an essay for The Cut: “I couldn’t compete with the deep pockets of corporate brands; at retail stores, prime shelf space comes at a price, and we couldn’t afford it. As we tried to grow, our sales wavered … Instead of focusing on the healthy, sustainable future of the company and meeting the needs of our loyal fan base, I rode a temperamental wave of appraising investors.” This decision sparked intense debate online over whether consumer support could ever truly offset structural funding gaps. Similarly, Hanifa, the luxury-fashion label founded by Anifa Mvuemba, paused production indefinitely in March 2026 after its holiday preorder sale triggered severe manufacturing delays; the resulting shipping backlogs sparked an internet dogpile against Mvuemba. Even legendary makeup artist Pat McGrath’s brand received heat when it filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in early 2026. Some commenters turned on McGrath, criticizing her luxury brand’s “elitist” price point for its supposed role in the bankruptcy.
But the controversy is perhaps most evident among the cohort of Black-owned brands that have secured contracts with Target. Last year, actress Tabitha Brown, who had an ongoing partnership with Target, faced backlash and vitriol after she released a video expressing concerns that a boycott would affect Black-owned brands. Frustrated consumers accused her of being tone-deaf and prioritizing her own bottom line over solidarity. And designer Kahlana Barfield Brown was put in a tough spot when the launch of her stand-alone apparel line, KBB by Kahlana, in September 2025, collided with the national Target boycott. Online critics openly challenged her. As she wrote in her own piece for The Cut, “Too often I found myself scrolling through comments that left me crushed … What kept me up at night was the fear that my community would think I ‘sold out.’” These examples and others illustrate how Black founders have become wedged between massive corporate entities — ones actively rolling back their diversity commitments — and a fatigued consumer base expressing its broader sense of societal betrayal.
I know the conundrum Butler and her peers are facing isn’t a new one; it was not birthed by the Threads or TikTok algorithms. Before launching my own business, I spent a decade working for and advising Oprah Winfrey, and during that time, I witnessed firsthand what happens when the scale of an enterprise conflicts with the hopes of a community. Still, not until I crossed the line from adviser to operator did I truly understand the weight of this dynamic.
I became a founder in 2022, after feeling as if I’d reached the top of the corporate ladder and could see the ways the current culture of work damages us. I set out to build a company to help usher us into a new era of work, and ultimately I raised a seven-figure investment round, backed predominantly by Black venture-capital firms, for the first iteration of the product. My company wasn’t a consumer beauty brand; our technology wasn’t designed to target Black shoppers exclusively. Yet, as a Black founder, I witnessed the directives from mentors, investors, and peers arrive quickly anyway: How you show up reflects on all of us. Be mindful of x, y, and z. There are so few of us in these rooms. I was explicitly told that my success or failure wasn’t just an individual data point on a spreadsheet — it was a proxy for the capabilities of an entire demographic. What happened to me would dictate and determine what was possible for the next Black founder trying to get a meeting.
White founders are allowed the luxury of individualism; they get to fail fast, pivot wildly, or implode spectacularly without their downfalls being weaponized against every other white entrepreneur. But for us, survival requires carrying the economic aspirations and reputational stakes of a community on our backs. Instead of emboldening me, that pressure did the opposite. It made me self-conscious. It made me timid about putting myself out there, constantly policing my own narrative out of fear that a single mistake would close doors for others
I can’t presume to know exactly what other Black founders — like Butler, N’Diaye-Mbaye, Mvuemba, and many others — feel, or if their experience was like mine. But it is evident that the relationship between Black-owned brands and their consumers is a deeply emotional one. Brands like the Lip Bar are often seen as political statements, even as reflections of our own beauty and worth. Frequently, we consumers demand these businesses perform the miracles of community care, political resistance, and emotional validation that the rest of society denies us. And when a Black-owned business that specifically serves Black people signals it’s looking beyond its core demographic for growth, that can understandably trigger an intense reaction from a consumer base accustomed to being abandoned.
But a start-up cannot heal the effects of systemic redlining. A beauty brand cannot fix the venture-capital ecosystem. And a fashion brand can’t overturn a massive corporation’s DEI mandates.
The anger that should be directed upward at the inhospitableness of these institutions gets turned inward. We end up policing our innovators into paralysis, asking them to defend their integrity until their nervous systems give out. Survival for Black founders requires their communities to grant them the one thing the world never gives Black women: the grace to be human, to try to survive a system that was not built for them. And with more than 600,000 Black women being actively pushed out of the corporate ranks since February, entrepreneurship has stopped being an aspirational pivot. For many, it has become the only way forward.
So how do they actually navigate this machine without being burned out by the feedback?
For over a decade, I witnessed Oprah sustain a global reach while navigating shifting cultural tides. That taught me survival isn’t about steering away from storms; it’s about securing your foundation so you can withstand them. When advising founders now, I tell them that if they want to scale a business while fiercely loving a community that has sustained deep hurt, there are a few nonnegotiable rules they must live by.
As a founder, year sense of purpose must transcend any other external motivator. If you know your “why,” you can endure almost any “how.” If your why is tied to online applause or profitability, a bad week on social media will crush you. And you must expect backlash, especially in this era when societal and interpersonal trust are at historic lows. Too many modern founders secretly hope the criticism simply won’t happen. Survival requires realizing that public opinion is a weather pattern, not a final judgment, and that feedback — even of the most intense variety — is part of the process. Through it all, you must stay anchored in a posture of service while creating undeniable products for the people you have committed to helping. When the noise gets loud, the ultimate defense is the work itself.
Amid the calls for a boycott of the Lip Bar, an overwhelming wave of support came rushing in. Fellow founders and creatives flooded Butler’s posts to defend her, buy her products, and drown out the noise. These commenters pointed to the brand’s cultural equity, reminding critics that just recently, in October, the Lip Bar’s highly anticipated collaboration with rapper Kash Doll completely sold out, reinforcing the brand’s commitment to continue to serve Black millennial women. Today’s founders have to realize that you cannot manage the narrative around those who are committed to misunderstanding you. But you can listen to, embrace, and, most important, serve those who believe in your vision — and extend to one another the grace you wish to receive.
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