Diving brief:
- Joining other retailers supporting black entrepreneurs, Neighborhood Goods launched a “Buy Good. Buy Black” campaign. initiative Thursday to support black entrepreneurs, according to an announcement emailed to Retail Dive.
- Shoppers can browse various black-owned brands curated by Roslyn Karamoko, vice president of strategic business development and creator of Detroit is the New Black. As part of the effort, the company said it will provide featured brands with space, exposure, marketing support and networking opportunities with other entrepreneurs.
- All brands will be featured in stores and online, and Neighborhood Goods will launch a standalone e-commerce page to tell each brand’s story. Additional brands will launch throughout February, and the company plans to incorporate this effort into its overall retail strategy.
Overview of the dive:
The “Buy right. Buy black.” initiative follows Neighborhood Good’s brick-and-mortar debut in late 2018. The business calls itself an evolution of the department store, with an assortment that rotates to offer a variety of products from small businesses, DTC brands and other companies. Since expanding offline, Neighborhood Goods has also introduces the market in Austin last springwhich promotes consumer packaged goods brands.
For this new effort, Neighborhood Goods will display its black-owned brands as a collective and also by category. Some of them have worked with Neighborhood Goods before, while others are new. Among the brands featured in the initiative are Wrap Life, a fashion and accessories brand; Reddish, a beauty mark; and Aia Paper, a lifestyle brand.
“This effort will seek to identify and support some of the fastest growing brands in the industry and will evolve into a pillar of Neighborhood Goods’ retail approach and strategy,” Neighborhood Goods wrote in the release. “Over time, curation will expand and localize, as a key long-term element of the retailer’s current and future stores.”
Support for black-owned brands over the past two years has grown following the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Last year, Sephora unveiled its first campaign highlighting black-owned brandsa move made by the retailer after signing the fifteen percent pledge in 2020. Target in April pledged to spend more than $2 billion with Black-Owned Businesses by 2025, including adding products from over 500 Black-Owned Businesses across multiple categories. And in February 2021, Ulta committed to spending more than $25 million on its diversity and inclusion efforts, including investments in marketing, merchandising, in-store experience and employee training.
So far in 2022, select retailers continue to highlight Black entrepreneurs and expand their diversity and inclusion initiatives. Earlier this month, Target added 40 new beauty brands, 20 of them owned or founded by blacks. In early February, Ulta announced another round of spending on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. This year, the retailer plans to double its spending to $50 million, according to a company press release.
