Fragrance brand Brown Girl Jane’s perfume bottles sit on shelves at Sephora near some of the most storied labels in the fashion and beauty world, including Prada and Dior.
For the Black-owned brand, getting a retailer to bet on it was just the start, Brown Girl Jane CEO and co-founder Malaika Jones said. She said Sephora has supported the company so it can better compete with well-known brands with huge marketing budgets and glossy celebrity endorsements.
Brown Girl Jane got a $100,000 grant last year to help grow its business through Sephora’s Accelerate program, which aims to boost founders who are people of color. Sephora spotlighted the fragrance brand in an email to customers in early February, putting it in front of potential shoppers who don’t know its name. Brown Girl Jane’s sales more than doubled after Sephora began carrying the company’s fragrances online and at select stores about a year ago.
While Sephora has put its weight behind its brand incubator, much larger retailers like Walmart and Target recently scaled back similar efforts focused on finding and funding more brands founded by people of color. Without that support from the retailers themselves, brands like Brown Girl Jane could face a tougher time getting on shelves — and succeeding once they get there.
“For small brands, but for any brands, really, it’s a constant fight for relevance and for visibility,” Jones said. “And so when you don’t have that commitment or even that understanding from the retailer side, it becomes quite difficult for small brands to survive — even when they’ve made it on shelves.”
When retailers launched supplier diversity programs — many of them in the months after police killed George Floyd in 2020 — top industry leaders including Walmart CEO Doug McMillon and Target CEO Brian Cornell spoke out about the institutional barriers that people of color face, including when financing their businesses. Now, as more retailers drop diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Black-owned brands may find it harder to clear those hurdles.
In January, Target dropped specific DEI pledges that it made four years ago after Floyd was murdered a short distance from its Minneapolis headquarters. Among those goals, the big-box retailer had committed to adding products from more than 500 Black-owned brands to its shelves or website and spending $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by 2025.
Late last year, Walmart confirmed that it was ending key diversity initiatives, including winding down the Center for Racial Equity, a nonprofit that the retailer started and funded with $100 million to tackle racial inequities. It had chosen finance as one of those focus areas, noting the gap in funding for Black entrepreneurs.
Gutting those efforts could jeopardize a valuable pathway for Black founders to build their businesses and reach the millions of shoppers who browse the websites and aisles at the nation’s largest and best-known retailers.
Not every major retailer has dropped DEI initiatives. Sephora, Costco and E.l.f. Beauty, among others, have reaffirmed their commitments. And the most prominent effort to increase the share of Black-owned brands on retail shelves, the 15 Percent Pledge, still has major backers.
A larger retreat
Companies from Google to Ford and Tractor Supply have rolled back their initiatives to boost representation of people of color, women and LGBTQ+ people, as political backlash and pressure from conservative activists has intensified. The trend only accelerated after President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning DEI programs in the federal government and describing the efforts as “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences.”
It’s a sharp change from about five years ago, when companies released a wave of announcements committing to fighting inequity. They made bold pledges to add more diversity to their workforces and C-suites, seek out Black and minority vendors and donate to philanthropic causes that fought racism and supported expanded opportunities for marginalized groups.
Fear of litigation, activist investor scrutiny and political pressure has caused companies to backpedal or keep their initiatives below the radar, said Jon Solorzano, an attorney at Vinson & Elkins who advises companies on DEI.
One of those lawsuits targeted The Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based venture capital fund dedicated to awarding grants to businesses founded by Black women to bridge a longstanding funding gap. Only 1.3% of the more than $345 billion raised by venture-backed startups in 2021 went to Black founders, according to Deloitte and Venture Forward’s 2023 report. About 2.4% went to startups led by female founders and 2.1% of that total went to startups led by Hispanic founders.
American Alliance for Equal Rights, a conservative group founded by Edward Blum, sued The Fearless Fund in 2023, accusing it of discriminating against non-Black business owners. Blum previously fought against race-based college admissions, a campaign that led to the Supreme Court’s ruling that affirmative action policies are unconstitutional — which some companies cited last year in ending their DEI initiatives.
As part of a settlement reached last year, The Fearless Fund shut down its grant program.
Solorzano said that lawsuit had a chilling effect and will “seriously undermine some of these [supplier] initiatives.” He said he expects more corporations to scrub numbers from their diversity programs, including supplier programs focused on increasing Black- and minority-owned brands on shelves.
Yet ending or scaling back efforts to seek out merchandise that reflects the diversity of U.S. consumers could put a company at risk, too, he said. Not only could companies face boycotts, but also they could miss out on fresher items and brands that help them stand apart from competitors.
The companies standing firm
Even as some retailers walk back diversity pledges, Sephora, Costco and E.l.f. Beauty, have doubled down on those efforts not as a feel-good move, but as a meaningful part of their business strategies.
Sephora, a 15 Percent Pledge member which is owned by LVMH, has increased the percentage of Black-owned brands on its shelves from 3% in 2020 to about 10% as of 2025, said Artemis Patrick, CEO of Sephora North America. In its hair category, 15% of the brands are Black-owned.
Sephora started Accelerate in 2016 with a focus on female founders. The six-month incubator helps mentor business owners, connects them to investors and gives them the opportunity to launch at Sephora.
The retailer pivoted the program in 2020 to focus on Black and other minority founders to address “the need of the evolving consumer and where we truly did feel like we had an assortment gap,” Patrick said.
So far, more than 33 Black- and minority-owned brands have gone through the incubator, she said.
“Our business is really good and the fact that we’ve been really focused on diversifying our assortment, I think there’s a strong correlation,” she said.
She added “it would be very strange in a beauty category to not be driving diversity in your assortment that meets the needs of your clients.”
At Costco’s annual meeting last month, 98% of shareholders rejected a proposal that requested a report on the risk of Costco maintaining diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
In a proxy statement ahead of the meeting, the warehouse club’s board of directors said diversity benefits its business and helps it better serve a wide range of customers.
“Among other things, a diverse group of employees helps bring originality and creativity to our merchandise offerings, promoting the ‘treasure hunt’ that our customers value,” it wrote.
Costco’s board added that diversity across its suppliers “fosters creativity and innovation in the merchandise and services that we offer our members.”
Tarang Amin, CEO of popular Gen Z makeup brand E.l.f. Beauty, called the company’s diversity “a key competitive advantage in terms of our results” in an interview with CNN earlier this month. He said the company’s employees are 74% women, 76% Gen Z and millennial and over 44% diverse and “reflect the community we serve.”
The rise of 15 Percent Pledge
Nearly five years ago, Aurora James challenged companies in an Instagram post to dedicate more of their shelf space to Black-owned businesses. That idea, which she proposed days after Floyd’s murder, started the 15 Percent Pledge.
“So many of your businesses are built on Black spending power,” she wrote at the time. “So many of your stores are set up in Black communities. So many of your posts seen on Black feeds. This is the least you can do for us. We represent 15% of the population and we need to represent 15% of your shelf space.”
Sephora was the first company to sign the pledge. About 22 companies are active participants in the pledge, including Macy’s and Nordstrom, according to the nonprofit. The 15 Percent Pledge has a directory of Black-owned brands on its website. It also awards grants to businesses and raises money to back Black-owned businesses through an annual gala, which drew celebrities, actors and business leaders including Kim Kardashian, Kelly Rowland and Jesse Williams earlier this month.
Some of the changes inspired by the pledge are visible on shelves.
Sephora has more than tripled the Black-owned brands on its shelves in the past five years. In the email to customers, it noted that number had spiked from eight to 30 since it took the Fifteen Percent Pledge in 2020.
Those brands include makeup, shampoos and more backed by small entrepreneurs and celebrities, including Fenty Beauty by Rihanna, Pattern by Tracee Ellis Ross and Sienna Naturals, which was co-founded by Hannah Diop and actress Issa Rae.
Nordstrom, which also signed on to the 15 Percent Pledge, has now added more Black-owned brands, too, including Buttah Skin, Briogeo and Honor the Gift.
And Macy’s, another 15 Percent Pledge participant, has had an accelerator for over a decade which was launched to support underrepresented brand owners and founders. The Workshop, which started in 2011, offers grant funding and education for companies seeking to make it on retailers’ shelves and websites.