When Kimberly Lewis founded CurlMix more than a decade ago, she imagined a thriving beauty brand built by and for Black women. Today, she is fighting to keep it alive. Lewis says she needs customers to place 20,000 orders. Lewis says that push would help raise enough cash to pay short-term debt and make the business self-sufficient. Her company has generated more than $40 million in lifetime revenue and raised $12 million in venture capital, but she is still a half-million dollars away from stability. The gap, she says, reveals how uneven the playing field can be.
“I know founders who, let’s say they got $10 million and they were burning a ton of money and they couldn’t raise additional money and they had a friend who worked at a big seven conglomerate that could purchase the company…And essentially you don’t have to worry about, okay, I gotta close this business,” Lewis explained. “You get a soft place to land because of your network.”
For many Black founders, she says, that kind of safety net doesn’t exist.
“I actually don’t need a lot of money to make CurlMix self sufficient, less than half a million dollars. But there’s nobody that can there’s nobody else that can give that to me now,” Lewis said. “You don’t actually need a lot to make this work, but because I don’t have a soft place to land that we would just close and lose all that value.”
A Worsening Job Market
Black women’s unemployment and job losses have surged, adding extra pressure on business owners like Lewis. According to a Economic Policy Institute analysis, the unemployment rate for Black workers rose to 7.5 percent in August 2025, with the decline concentrated among Black women.
Moreover, recent reports estimate that about 300,000 Black women have exited or been pushed out of the U.S. workforce in just a few months, largely due to federal-workforce cuts and structural job-losses in key sectors. These numbers matter because they show that Black women are not only at the front of the unemployment line, they are also losing a measure of economic stability. In that context, entrepreneurship is often offered as a fallback. But as the strain shows, owning a business carries its own risks and vulnerabilities.
Fast Growth, Fragile Foundation
According to the Wells Fargo 2025 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses report, Black women owned about 2.02 million businesses in 2024, accounting for 14 percent of all women-owned firms. They employed roughly 648,000 people and generated about $118.7 billion in revenue. Despite strong participation, the average Black-women-owned firm brings in far less revenue than its peers. The Wells Fargo report concluded that if these businesses reached parity with other women-owned firms, they would add more than $400 billion annually to the U.S. economy.
Access to capital remains a major obstacle. A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau study found that Black small-business applicants were significantly less likely to be encouraged to apply for loans, even when their financial profiles were equal to or better than those of white applicants. A National Urban League fact sheet found that forty percent of Black-owned businesses were denied loans, lines of credit, or cash advances entirely, compared with 18 percent of white-owned businesses. It’s a reality Lewis knows all too well.
“And so when you say, can you just get a loan? The, the loans have been gotten for the kind of business that I could get,” she explained. “I need a little bit more runway to figure the business out.”
CurlMix in Survival Mode
Lewis says the company has spent the past two years shifting from a high-growth, venture-backed model to a leaner, sustainable one.
“Being profitable was not a requirement for product based companies coming after 2020. It wasn’t a requirement until last year,” she said.
That shift forced difficult decisions.
“We had to go from 40 people to 14. You can’t keep the same kind of standard of business,” Lewis said.
The campaign for 20,000 orders, she says, will accommodate all of the business’ orders and give CurlMix extra cash to pay off short term debt. That level of sales would leave the company in a comfortable cash position to continue to thrive in 2026, according to Lewis.
Shared Struggles
While CurlMix fights to stay alive, other Black-women-owned brands have recently had to face a harsh reality. Lewis says she knows about a dozen other founders—nearly all Black women—who are either closing their businesses or facing their hardest year yet. The combination of higher unemployment, limited capital access, and shrinking consumer spending has made this one of the toughest periods for Black-women-owned businesses in recent memory.
“What they say when the economy gets sick Black people get pneumonia, you know, it’s like that,” Lewis said. “Then Black women are the fastest growing group entrepreneurs. Right? So then of course we would be the ones to suffer the most.”
Bodycare company SKNMUSE recently announced its closure with a message to customers: “Today is your last chance to place orders with us. We are so grateful for the opportunity to serve you all … This community has been everything to us.”
Another founder, Yelitsa Jean-Charles, built Healthy Roots Dolls from a college class project into a seven-figure company that sold in more than 1,600 Target stores. She raised over $1 million in venture capital and $500,000 in grants, but announced she was stepping away.
“Leaving the first company and product I ever created has been one of the most difficult decisions of my life. Healthy Roots Dolls has been my life’s work,” Jean-Charles wrote on Linkedin. “While I will always be proud to be the founder of Healthy Roots Dolls, I’ve since transitioned out of the company and am now focused on my next chapter.”
Together, these stories show three stages of a shared challenge: CurlMix fighting to survive, SKNMUSE closing with gratitude, and Healthy Roots Dolls’ founder transitioning on her own terms. Each underscores the fragility of success when capital and networks are limited.
Turning to Community
With cash support difficult to secure for many of these Black women-owned businesses, Lewis believes the most sustainable solution may come from within the community itself.
“I would love if this turned into a ‘Protect ‘insert your business name’ movement where people are coming out openly, saying, hey, I may have to close before they have to close,” Lewis said. “And then people are doing the cash mob where they come and buy up all their inventory and then we are basically funding each other without equity, just with sales.”
She says that kind of “non-dilutive capital” lets founders retain ownership while getting the cash support they can’t access through banks or investors.
Finding peace in persistence
For Lewis and many of her peers, the path ahead depends as much on collective action as on individual resilience. Without larger financial networks or institutional backing, many say their best hope is each other.
“I would like to, I’m looking forward to not running my business in crisis. To have some cash in the bank to be profitable and to just be focused on, like, sustainable growth,” Lewis explained. “Sounds like peace to me.”