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Kadidja Dosso: 00:00 If I had the codes and the keys to the game, I feel like personally and spiritually it's my duty to provide that to you. Now, whatever you do with it is what you do with it, but if I have the answers, then it's my job to give it to you and share the codes.
Felecia Hatcher: 00:21 Welcome to So Ambitious, a podcast series about what's possible when Black and Latinx founders can build uninterrupted. I'm your host, Felecia Hatcher. I'm an author, an entrepreneur, an investor, and a mom. I'm also the CEO of Black Ambition, a non-profit initiative founded by the Pharrell Williams, working to close the opportunity and wealth gap for Black and Latinx communities through entrepreneurship. Each year, Black Ambition awards up to $3 million via two annual prizes to some of the most ambitious entrepreneurs in this solar system. Black Ambition is a commitment to cultivating the pipelines of diverse talent through mentorship, founder friendly investment terms, and a promise to increase the number of black and Latinx entrepreneurs who succeed at raising the startup capital needed for their business. I came into this work because I have been an entrepreneur in multiple facets from food to tech to owning a co-working space, and I was also an ecosystem builder who built community for entrepreneurs, the community that I didn't have when I took on investment capital and I needed it the most.
01:25 I mean, seriously, did you know that if Black and Latinx entrepreneurs were supported at the same rate as white entrepreneurs, the United States could add 1.1 million new businesses and 9 million new jobs to the economy? Over the course of these 10 episodes, you will hear the stories of people building, creating, and organizing with authenticity in community and against all odds. In this series, we're passing the mic to ambitious and often audacious entrepreneurs who share the codes because they picked up along the way. This isn't your ordinary business podcast. We're propelling the conversation about ambition beyond money, titles and vanity metrics and diving into what it takes to do impactful work that transforms communities. As for me, you can consider me a guide of sorts, filling in the blanks as we navigate these stories of trial, triumph and, of course, ambition. Let's get started.
02:28 Our first guess is Kadidja Dosso from a dorm room hairstylist at Hampton University to a businesswoman securing placements for her organic beauty line in some of the biggest retailers in the world. Kadidja is so ambitious, so much so that she happens to be our 2021 Black Ambition HBCU Grand Prize winner. I'm excited for Kadidja to be our first guest because she is literally the epitome of ambitious and taking big, bold steps and never settling. From working at one of the top companies that people would hope and wish to work for, to saying that's not enough. I have this dream that I cannot let go of, to winning the Black Ambition Prize and then being ambitious and taking some big steps to secure her success moving forward. We'll hear how she leaned into her personal connections and harnessed her own self-confidence to build her business and uplift her community. Let's get into Kadidja's story.
Kadidja Dosso: 03:30 I grew up in West Philly on a nice little block called Pemberton Street. So my grandfather on my mom's side, he migrated up to Philadelphia in the '60s with my grandmother from Florence, South Carolina, and so he started his own bricklaying, masonry construction business. So me at four years old going to work, would pop up on Saturdays mixing concrete with him, that was actually my first introduction into entrepreneurship and so he, outside of just being a bricklayer doing masonry work, he was a very personable person and had a lot of connections along with my grandmother too, but they also were very involved in the church and they leveraged their church connections as well as our family connections to be able to get them so many different deals. He used to teach me this phrase of, "It's so much easier to be nice than it is to be nasty."
04:23 And so that always has stuck with me in understanding how to leverage connections, how to not sever ties unless they need to be severed. And even if you do need to sever them, remember that your lasting impression that you're making and leaving on people. To even understand as a kid, when I look at some of my baby pictures when my mom, she used to work there and to think about the connections that my grandfather had created and cultivated not just for himself but for the family and for the business, the greater good of the business, that inspired me also to understand how to leverage connections.
Felecia Hatcher: 04:59 Howard Hamilton, the investor, says that if you don't have the money, then you need to become the money and becoming the money is about being a currency and a vessel to opportunities and connections and it's all about leverage. Do you have the leverage to make something happen for others and in turn, make something happen for yourself? Leveraging connections was a valuable lesson that Kadidja wasted no time putting into practice. Like grandfather, like granddaughter.
Kadidja Dosso: 05:28 When I turned 10 and my fifth grade teacher was like, "Hey, Kadidja, what do you want to be when you grow up?" I was like, I want to own an organic beauty empire. I did not know what that meant, but all I knew was that I wanted to be the organic version of Madame C.J. Walker. I started to dig more into it and actually my mom allowed me to start doing my own hair and braiding my own hair, so I started braiding my friend's hair in middle school and I started to go to the beauty supply store as a hair stylist or kitchen stylist, I need a product. So I would go to the beauty supply store and I would find that all of the products that I needed had words that I couldn't pronounce and ingredients that I couldn't pronounce in it, and I didn't understand what was
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in it. The people behind the counter didn't. The people that owned the building didn't, so I was like, "Okay, there's something we are going to hear."
Felecia Hatcher: 06:16 Okay, so a 10-year-old focused on becoming the organic version of Madame C.J. Walker, it's giving Afro-futurists and I'm here for it. After growing her homegirl clientele and graduating high school, Kadidja set her sights on bigger pastures, college. She took those hair styling skills with her to Hampton University where she quickly used them to build new community and new business on campus.
Kadidja Dosso: 06:43 I was a campus hair stylist in all of my dorms. I lived on campus all four years and partially because I was a full scholarship student, but also because it was easy access to get my clients to come to my dorm room to get their hair done and everything like that. In my junior year of Hampton, I had actually developed my first business plan and the business plan, I'm literally looking at it right now, it's called Building the Organic Beauty Empire. I mean, from the first steps of me just throwing the name and ideas out there, my best friends that I built along with for those past four years, I threw the name out to them, I'm like, "Hey, you all, like I've always said I want to own a organic beauty empire. What do you all think about the name Dosso Beauty?"
07:25 And, "I don't know if you all knew this, but my last name is also synonymous for Fofana, which also means Hunter and my father, my father's West African, Ivorian. This is, I'm on a constant hunt to make sure that I'm going to be able to find and provide organic beauty products for our people, and so that's the concept behind the name, and what do you all think about it?" And so they were my first sounding boards. They were the first people to test out my products when I would just be ordering samples from different places and even when I started to formalize the actual business, my first web designer was my Neo, I'm a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated. My first social media manager who is somebody who is another Neo, all the people that have a... Actually, half of my team right now are people that I knew from Hampton.
Felecia Hatcher: 08:12 Leveraging connections is one of the most important steps in building your business at any stage, but it's especially important during those early stages when feedback is crucial. Kadidja graduated from Hampton, moved to Harlem and secured a full-time job as a consultant for a Fortune 500 consulting firm, but despite a demanding 9:00 to 5:00 schedule, Dosso Beauty stayed her primary focus.
Kadidja Dosso: 08:36 Couple months after I graduated is actually when I formalized Dosso Beauty, literally right after I started graduating. I was literally walking into every single beauty supply store you could think of. At the time I was in Harlem, I was walking in, I was lurking. I'm like, "All right, what products are at the front of the store? What are the products
that are at the counter? Are these the discounted products? Are they giving out samples or are they selling samples now?" And SEO and Google wasn't as optimized as it is now, but I would literally YouTube and search top five products to start a beauty supply store with.
Felecia Hatcher: 09:10 And that's when Kadidja had a very simple but brilliant idea.
Kadidja Dosso: 09:14 That's how I came up with the idea to start with make eyelashes because people were almost on the cusp of verge of getting the individual eyelashes, but for people that couldn't afford to pay for them which are i.e. college students, they couldn't afford to keep up with a hundred dollar a month maintenance fee for that. And they were looking to still look and feel good about themselves or get dressed up or dolled up, they want to make eyelashes not only that, they didn't have to throw away after one wear but that they can use and clean for up to 20 times. And so I was like girls like lashes, I think I can put a thousand dollars into purchasing these lashes, getting some, not worry about making the packaging perfect, but marketing and using my Hampton connection to see what students were still on campus, what recent alums that were trying to become influencers.
Felecia Hatcher: 10:04 Staying in touch with her Hampton community helped Kadidja figure out exactly who her target market was and what they needed. That's step one, but she still needed to figure out what it took to turn her ideas into product. And as it turns out, she quickly learned that it also required some thick skin.
Kadidja Dosso: 10:22 And I'm not going to lie, this is so ambitious. Our founder and CEO keeps it real. I'm going to keep it real. I asked several black owned beauty supply stores of how or where I should get started, and they basically gave me the cold shoulder and that actually propelled me even more to be like, "Yo, I really got to make it so that I don't be that same founder that closes the door on somebody who's young, bushy eyed and has a bright future." If I had the codes and the keys to the game, I feel like personally and spiritually, it's my duty to provide that to you. Now, whatever you do with it is what you do with it, but if I have the answers, then it's my job to give it to you and share the codes.
Felecia Hatcher: 11:02 So how do you stay focused on the goals you set out to accomplish once you face rejection?
Kadidja Dosso: 11:07 First and foremost, I go into everything with my blinders and I honestly don't care who else is in the room. I came from the world of consulting and so interestingly enough, I was probably one of the only people on my project that was constantly asking for feedback because I was given mediocre feedback. Oh, you're doing great, but somebody else has a little bit more experience, but what does that mean? So what other experience do they have that I need to make me better? That's the type of energy that I give in general because I believe, going back to my last name, I believe that I am a hunter. I go after whatever it is that I want and that I feel like my community need.
Felecia Hatcher: 11:42 Knowing and trusting who you are as an entrepreneur is crucial to setting your business up for success. Along the way, there will be people who even though their intentions may be in the right place will try to tell you who you are and what your business should be. Like Kadidja says, that's the moment where the blinders should go up. I'll never forget early on when I started my food business in Miami and after winning a pitch competition, a really, really successful food entrepreneur told me, "You should change your name. The name of your company, Fever, sounds too new. You need something that sounds very established like it's been here before, that is tried and trusted." And I had to push back on him and say like, "No, that's actually the opposite of what I want. I want someone to feel like this is something new that they've never seen before, that's more of a lifestyle brand than something that their grandmother or their grandfathers made years ago."
12:41 And so very easy in that moment to trust that person because they are very successful but I knew what I wanted and I had to stick to my guns just like Kadidja said about knowing who you are and trusting and putting the blinders on. With the clarity she needed about what Dosso Beauty was going to be. Kadidja's next step was to raise some money. Kadidja had seen the application for the Black Ambition Prize get posted, but never once thought that she could win it, but that same week, a close friend texts her the link to the application. Then another friend did and another, and when she had five different texts from five different friends, all suggested she apply, she knew what she had to do. You all, Kadidja has some great friends.
Kadidja Dosso: 13:27 I went into this application like, yo, it's like the last dance. It's like, listen man, I'm a young kid from West Philly. I'm a West African and I just want to change the world with beauty supplies and there's this crazy growth potential in this market. It's a trillion-dollar industry and less than 3% of it is owned by black women, but we consume over 89%. How can you help me to get my foot into this door and really kick this door down? I'm a revolutionary. That's the type of energy I was on the application. I love Black Ambition and love the application because they invested in my potential, not just what I can show upfront. At first, I had a little bit of imposter syndrome and I'm like, "Dang." We got people building computers over here. We got people curing cancer over there. It was crazy. I just want to sell some beauty supplies and make sure my people look good. So I was like, "Dang, I'm top 10?"
Felecia Hatcher: 14:24 Top 10 quickly became first place and I couldn't wait to let Kadidja know.
Kadidja Dosso: 14:28 The moment that Felicia hopped on-
Felecia Hatcher: 14:31 So Pharrell's here to share some
exciting news with you this morning or today.
Kadidja Dosso: 14:36 Okay. And I saw Pharrell on the screen, I immediately was shocked.
Pharrell Willia...: 14:40 What we want you to know is that we're super excited about your venture and across thousands of applicants, your venture and team stood out the most. And so we are excited to share that we have selected your team as the Black Ambition HBCU Prize Early Business Rrack grand prize winner.
Kadidja Dosso: 14:59 If you ever watch the video on YouTube, I was like, "Uh-huh," the whole time, and it's not because I was starstruck or anything, it was really like I felt seen.
Felecia Hatcher: 15:11 And I'll never forget when we jumped on the Zoom to congratulate Kadidja, although we told her it was going to be an interview, the excitement, the tears, the passion literally jumped through the screen. She was everyone and everything that we hoped for the inaugural Black Ambition HBCU Prize, but her resourcefulness, her grit, not settling for good, but definitely going to great was all the things that we hoped for. And that's honestly what Pharrell said to me after we got off that Zoom, "What I thought about and dreamt about Black Ambition and what it could become without knowing who the entrepreneurs were going to be, Kadidja was literally the epitome of who I hoped for when I dreamt of Black Ambition."
15:56 By many standards, Kadidja was set, but her ambition stretched beyond her circumstances at the time, and she turned it up. There were a few more ambitious moves Kadidja had to take after receiving the $250,000 investment. First, she was quitting her job to dedicate all her time and energy to building Dosso Beauty. Next, she expanded her early catalog of mink lashes to include hypoallergenic braiding hair, as well as a number of eco-friendly hair tools and accessories. With a quarter mill in the bank and new products in the market, she was smooth sailing, right?
Kadidja Dosso: 16:33 Child, it did not go exactly how I thought it would. When I tell you I'm extremely grateful for $250,000. $250,000 was such a big number to me because I had never seen what $250,000 looked like. But I think that when you have access to capital and access to a lump sum of wealth at one time, it's like, "Oh my God, fireworks," instead of being as strategic. And now then I've accumulated it, I see how great of an investment it is, but I see how much more I need so that was my pre-seed.
17:08 It was like, "Oh, this is a nice check. This is beautiful. This is just the beginning, honey, for real, for real." Because when I look five years down the line and I'm saying I want to have a eight, nine figure company, 250 is a drop in a bucket for real, which means... But that also, for me, gave me so much more confidence too, because it was like, yo, if you can get 250 off of potential, when it is time for you to do fundraising and really raise your seed round, girl, you not going less than 2.5 mil. It's been pretty cool to be full
time and really see how money works and make mistakes, but also make great wins and decisions.
Felecia Hatcher: 17:54 Kadidja identified a real need in the market and developed a product line to address it. She started selling on Amazon, got Dosso products into Walmart, and made a foray into wholesale retail with Faire. She credits this early traction to growing Dosso's brand awareness.
Kadidja Dosso: 18:10 This is crazy. The fact that we've done over 15,000 orders on Amazon till this day, year to date is crazy to me. That's crazy but it's also showing that once we've been able to get great press with Black Ambition, get organic great press with our PR team, people now know about the product that has revolutionized the industry. They know about our hypoallergenic braiding hair. They know how bomb our S-Control is. They understand that our cones and all of our beauty tools, our beauty supplies are made of eco-friendly material and they're like, "Yo, this is a brand that I can believe in. This is somebody who has started this brand and started this company that looks and feels like me and is attainable."
Felecia Hatcher: 19:01 Then she received an opportunity with consumer goods and food delivery company, Gopuff. It was a full circle moment for the Philly bred entrepreneur.
Kadidja Dosso: 19:10 Gopuff has an accelerator that I'm now a part of that's starting up called Gopuff Put Me On. They said, "Kadidja," I had to send them some samples and everything like that," We absolutely love your products." And even though the accelerator won't start until Q3, Q4 of this year, we want for Black History Month your product to be readily available in 172 locations in the US. For me, I was literally screaming. I'm like, "Wow. Oh my God, this is crazy," because Gopuff, it started from two guys that went to Temple in Philly. I'm back home. It was like divine alignment for me. I was like, "Oh, this is lit."
Felecia Hatcher: 19:47 This opportunity came at the perfect time. She recently started selling wholesale directly to salons and hair stylists.
Kadidja Dosso: 19:54 And so they said, "Hey, we want to pay retail price for your wholesale products and buy thousands of them at a time." I was like, "Yo, this is perfect for me numbers wise," because I come from a numbers background, I'm like, "Yo, this is less work for me to have to do and more profit that I can make." I just now need to figure out on the finance side with my team, is our pricing structure correct? Are we going to make the margins that we want to make and everything like that?
20:20 And so for other deals that have come to me, it's more so like, all right, well let me take a glance at it. Let me run it past my team. Because I run my team very like a group effort. I'll be like, "Yo, we had this person presented this idea, what you all think about it?" So I think between my team collaborating as well as other guidance from mentors and making sure, "Hey, do this sound right. Is this good? You think this is a good opportunity? Is there something shady going on here? What's happening?" I think those are all great assets to be like, "Yo, let me just fact-check before I just say yes."
Felecia Hatcher: 20:58 Confidence is putting people around you that know more or different things than you do and trusting them to guide you in moments when you don't have it all figured out. I cannot stress enough the importance of having trustworthy people in your corner to help ensure you're making sound business decisions. The root word of confidence is confide. And confide means to trust, trust in yourself, your instincts and trust the people around you.
21:32 Black Ambition has a founder's pledge that we require our annual prize winners to commit to building companies that create pathways to wealth for their communities to expand access to advancement opportunities for underrepresented groups and to be generous with their support of those coming after them. For Kadidja, all of those things are innate. Satisfying her own standards and lifestyle just isn't enough. Dosso beauty had to create transformation opportunities for many people.
Kadidja Dosso: 22:02 I think that my financial goal is not necessarily a number, it's more so me being able to be financially comfortable to provide for myself and my future family in addition to making sure that I'm providing generational wealth and access to the people that I'm employing and the people that I'm coming in contact with. Obviously, I'm the CEO and founder or whatever, but this is a collective, and the reason it's a collective is because I've created a very diverse team that is reflective of our actual target audience. I'm learning how impactful the paycheck that I provide to my 1099s are to their lives. I'm literally providing people's livelihoods and so that I don't take that responsibility lightly at all whatsoever, but it also gives me access to be able to help them to create generational wealth for themselves, whether they're just working for me or working for somebody else as well too. And I don't take that lightly.
Felecia Hatcher: 23:01 This is why I love the work we're able to do. Kadidja brought a lifelong dream into reality and she's just getting started. First, she leveraged her connections to build her expertise, got early feedback on her brand and product and understood what her customers needed. Then when it came time to turn her idea into reality, she harnessed her self-confidence to move past cold shoulders, trust the expertise of her team, fundraise and pursue global retail partners. To me, that's what Black Ambition is all about.
Kadidja Dosso: 23:40 Black ambition means to me that we have the audacity to be our authentic black selves and to also take whatever these beautiful ideas that are in mind and turn it into realities. The words Black and ambition just go together, number one, because Black people been ambitious since the beginning of time. So Black Ambition for me really is more so a sense of culture and community versus just like a saying or a phrase or a company.
Felecia Hatcher: 24:14 On the next episode of So Ambitious, we'll be hearing from Eche Emole of Afropolitan. He and his team are employing cryptocurrency, NFTs, and Web3 to build the world's first digital nation.
Eche Emole: 24:27 You're an Afropolitan citizen. You navigate the world with your Afropolitan passport represented through NFTs. You make payments for goods and services with the Afropolitan super-app. You visit and you're allowed access into sovereign Afro towns located at across the world. And that's the vision at scale and that's what we're building here.
Felecia Hatcher: 24:47 That's next time on So Ambitious. To learn more about Dosso Beauty, check out the show notes and be sure to rate, like and subscribe to So Ambitious wherever you listen to podcasts. So Ambitious is a Black Ambition production brought to you by Heineken and co-produced by Moso Haus and You Had Me at Black. Our executive producers are Martina Abrahams Ilunga, and Ivanna Tucker. Samaya Adams is our supervising producer. This episode was produced by Jess Jupiter. Charlotte Morley is our associate producer. Our music is composed by Terrell Brook. Sapphire Stubbs is our marketing consultant. Special thanks to Moses Soyoola at OTHERtone and Samiyah Malik, Christine Joseph and Jermeen Sherman at Black Ambition. I'm your host, Felecia Hatcher.