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“When you look at the statistics when it comes to Black women founders, yes, I am an anomaly,” says Denise Woodard, CEO and founder of Partake Foods. “If Marcy Venture Partners hadn’t invested in us, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
Companies led by Black women typically receive less than 1% of all venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase. During the Diversity Tipping Point in May 2020, the period when corporate America acknowledged that Black Lives Matter, there was a significant investment in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. It also correlated with an uptick in VC funding for Black-founded and led start-ups. Then the ensuing DEI backlash happened, so the investments didn’t last long. According to Crunchbase, financing for Black founders dropped 45% in 2022.
Since founding her business in 2016, Woodard has raised more than $25 million in capital. In the past two years, Partake Foods, a consumer products goods brand offering delicious and better-for-you snacks free of the top nine allergens, has achieved 69% revenue growth. The company has increased distribution from 6,000 doors to 14,000 doors. She has built an incredible business, receiving industry accolades, a loyal consumer following, high-profile partnerships and more investors knocking on her door. And yet, Woodard knows this isn’t the case for many Black women founders.
“It’s clear that in my ecosystem, there is a deprioritization of DEI efforts over the last year. So, yes, I’m a Black and Korean American woman who’s raised more than $25 million for my startup, but there is still underwhelming, limited access to capital for Black and brown people,” Woodard says. “Less than 1% of all VC funding went to Black and Latina women in 2022. We are consistently over-mentored and under-funded.”
As she continues to grow and scale her company, here’s the advice Woodard has to share with other Black women starting businesses.
1. If you can’t stop thinking about your business idea, it’s time to go all in
“If your business idea keeps you up at night and pushes you out of bed in the morning, it’s time to go all in,” Woodard says. “Building a business can be soul-crushingly hard. So you have to believe in your capabilities and have an unwavering commitment that this business is going to solve a need and make an impact.”
Image credit: Partake
Woodard went all-in when it came to Partake Foods: She maxed out her credit cards, emptied her 401k and even sold her engagement ring. Building this business was a dream she couldn’t let go of. She decided to devote all her time, energy and resources to making it a reality. She also said she never once thought of quitting. “I would quit if the business concept no longer made sense or something had drastically changed. And I wasn’t going to quit just because things got tough. I want my daughter to know that persistence and patience are key and are, quite frankly, underrated qualities that more leaders need to embrace.”
2. Stay focused — you can’t do everything well
During the pandemic, more and more consumers were baking at home. So Woodard and her team decided to launch a line of baking products. She said she and her team are now course-correcting to focus on packaged cookies and other pantry staples. She recognized that they could have spent more time talking to consumers and studying the total addressable market.
“It’s easy to get distracted by shiny objects,” Woodard says. “The reality is you can’t do everything well. I look at Chobani, which is a mission-driven company focused on its core product of yogurt. It’s a reminder to continue to build your core business while slowly testing and trying what else you may want to build.”
Partake Foods recently launched Classic Grahams, which Woodard says are resonating with consumers, who use them for snacking and as an ingredient. In my family, my sister-in-law uses the Classic Grahams to make crusts for her assortment of delicious pies.
Related: Here’s the Biggest Way You Can Show Up for the Black Community Beyond Black History Month
3. Know your numbers inside and out
“Unfortunately, I still see investors who rely heavily on pattern matching when meeting founders. Investors may use experiences or patterns from their past to make decisions about future investments,” Woodard says. “While they may think this helps them make better decisions, there’s a risk they increase bias in the process. If they have never seen someone who looks like me, who is solving a problem they have never faced or heard of before, they may discount me and pass up an incredible investment opportunity.”
Woodard encourages founders she mentors to know their numbers inside and out. She acknowledges that many founders wear multiple hats like she has and will have a strong understanding of what’s working and what’s not. She had to learn it all: basic accounting, the return on investment in marketing and the details of what was happening with different customers. And yet, she knows the bar is different for Black women founders when it comes to raising capital, growing and scaling their businesses.
“My biggest piece of advice: Use your difference as your biggest source of advantage. Find the investors, customers and individuals who are aligned with your vision and mission and believe in your capabilities as a founder. Surround yourself with a community who will help you unlock the potential of your business.”
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It was 2012, and Beatrice Dixon was running out of patience. She’d been dealing with chronic bacterial vaginosis that returned almost monthly, and doctors continued to prescribe medication that was more of a quick fix than a long-term solution.
Dixon felt she wasn’t being heard, so she began to do some research on her own — which was overwhelming in its own right.
“I was in this perpetual state of taking medicine, going back to the doctor and getting another prescription,” Dixon says, “which then led to the doctor’s office of Google. Which is not the one that you want to be in. You don’t want to be on Google trying to figure out what’s going on with you.”
Dixon began alternating between medication and holistic remedies she researched online, but she saw no significant results. Then, her grandmother spoke to her in a dream.
She describes how her grandmother (whom she never got to meet) was sitting across from her at a round table. The room was all white, with just the two of them at the center.
“I remember her telling me, ‘I’m not here for us to have a conversation. I’m not going to be here long,'” Dixon recalls. “‘You need to memorize what’s on this paper, because this is going to solve your problem.'”
Dixon woke up with a kind of urgency she’d never experienced and began immediately jotting down the ingredients that came to her in her sleep. Dixon began collecting the aforementioned ingredients at Whole Foods, where she worked at the time, and after a few days, she created her own formula.
After the fifth day of using the formula, Dixon was entirely cured of her BV.
“It had literally gone away,” she says. “It was crazy. That was the moment when I realized that this is what I was going to be doing for the foreseeable future.”
Related: This Black Founder Stayed True to His Triple ‘Win’ Strategy to Build a $1 Billion Business
“It got to the point where people were saying, ‘Look, I can’t take this for free anymore.'”
After Dixon perfected her formula, she knew she had to share her discovery. Because Dixon had only raised financing from family and friends and had created the product in her own kitchen, she couldn’t afford a clinical trial — so she ran her own.
Dixon didn’t ask for money in exchange for her homemade product, which ultimately became The Honey Pot’s bestselling The Honey Pot Co’s Normal Wash. Instead, she asked that people review the formula and give her feedback on how well it worked or didn’t.
Her friends and family were hooked.
“It got to the point where people were saying, ‘Look, I can’t take this for free anymore, take some money,'” Dixon says.
That’s when Dixon knew she was onto something, so when news hit that the Bronner Brothers Beauty Show was coming to Atlanta, she took it as her chance to expand her reach.
“It felt like the best place for us to launch because there was nothing but humans with vaginas walking around,” Dixon laughs. “So we went to the hair show. We made 600 bottles. We sold 600 bottles. It was insane.”
Image Credit: Courtesy of The Honey Pot
“There was no plan B either, so this s**t had to work.”
This was in early 2014, only about a year and a half after Dixon made her first Honey Pot product. The business began to grow, and despite increasing demand, The Honey Pot company continued to operate out of Dixon’s kitchen for another two years while Dixon kept her full-time job at Whole Foods to make ends meet.
Through 80-hour weeks and tireless work, Dixon never wavered from her mission, certain that women needed her product in their lives. “It was really hard,” she recalls, “but I always knew that no matter what, we were going to be okay. There was no plan B either, so this s**t kind of had to work.
In the early days of Honey Pot, the team traveled to trade expos and natural hair shows where they’d give out products to people who were interested in their plant-derived approach to feminine care. One of those early recipients was a hairdresser, who was so impressed with the product that she told her client about it. That client was a buyer from Target — the rest is history.
Related: How the Founders of LOLA Learned to Talk up the Feminine Hygiene Market
The retail giant got wind of the company by 2016 and presented Dixon and her small team with a proposition to sell their products in their stores. It was the expansion Dixon had always dreamed of — literally. By the time Target decided to sell the products in stores nationwide, the company had produced around 24,000 bottles and made nearly $250,000.
From there, The Honey Pot continued to grow not just as a business, but as a platform to empower other women of color to “reclaim their wellness.”
Dixon and The Honey Pot launched its Reclaiming Wellness campaign in 2020, wherein the company — in partnership with Target — travels to historically Black universities and hosts seminars and talks on wellness and encourages women to “reclaim” their power when it comes to their bodies.
Image Credit: Courtesy of The Honey Pot
“As you grow as a business, it’s important for you to understand where you are, but also understand where you want to go when you have more resources.”
One of Dixon’s main initiatives is to address societal stereotypes when it comes to being a woman of color in the U.S. — particularly, she says, fighting against the problematic belief that “Black women are stronger.”
“That’s the mantra that creates an environment for Black women to be dying [during] childbirth more than anybody else,” she says. “We’re helping women understand that [they] don’t have to continue to die.”
Although the Reclaiming Wellness campaign is only in its third year, the initiative has been Dixon’s goal since starting the brand in 2014. Before 2020, Dixon didn’t have the capital to launch Reclaiming Wellness, so as the company grew, she jumped at the opportunity to finally carry out what her overarching mission was from the start.
“As you grow as a business, it’s important for you to understand where you are, but also understand where you want to go when you have more resources,” she says.
Now, in its third annual campaign, The Honey Pot is partnering with Target and traveling to Clark Atlanta, Howard, Prairie View A&M and North Carolina A&T to host panel discussions with specialists in both medicine and education to help women gain ownership of their well-being.
Dixon hopes that The Honey Pot will continue to not only serve as a resource for women to understand their bodies and find the treatment they need but also become a vehicle to pass information down to future generations.
“It is a very tribal thing, to be able to pass information down, and that is literally built into the fabric of Honey Pot — us being able to educate and empower women on what they need,” Dixon says. “From the beginning, we were focused on it being a generational thing. But what that’s grown into now is that it needs to be a generational thing as it relates to education, to self-love, to self-respect.”
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