We were lucky to catch up with Courtney Heywood – Pierce recently and have shared our conversation below.

Courtney, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later

I launched Care Blackage in under 24 hours, but I honestly think I did it at the right time.

It was 2020, we were in the middle of a pandemic, George Floyd had been murdered on camera, and I wanted to do something beyond just sitting with my feelings. I couldn’t go out and protest because of respiratory issues, so Care Blackage became my contribution to the cause. It provided a way for me to raise money for bail funds [I donated 100% of profit from my first two months of sales] while simultaneously giving my peers an outlet to spread joy.

I owe where I am today to the Care Blackage community. In the first six weeks of business, I had 50+ people take over the Instagram page to talk about their Black experience and share their favorite ways to practice self-care. What I thought was going to be a two-week long passion project, ended up turning into a full out business and I truly think having people see parts of themselves in others, especially during such an isolating time, is what kept the momentum going.

Care Blackage aims to spread love and positive energy while amplifying Black owned brands, Black experiences, and Black stories. It was a whirlwind, and I didn’t even have a business plan, but there is nothing I would change about the way Care Blackage launched.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m Courtney Heywood Pierce, MPA, and outside of running Care Blackage, I’m also @MatrimonyHomie on Tik Tok and the Head of Partnerships for a Black-owned start-up. A lot of what I do centers around uplifting the Black community, and making sure we know that we are valued and worthy of being our best selves.

With the launch of Care Blackage, I really wanted to make sure that my peers had the tools and resources to focus on self-care since a lot of what we see in the media or deal with in real life is triggering and can really desensitize us. It’s so easy to move on and pretend that there isn’t always a battle that we are fighting on some front, but I wanted to encourage us to pause and make sure we are taking care of ourselves. You can’t pour from an empty cup, and we can’t keep fighting these battles depleted.

What am I most proud of? The fact that I took some time away from Care Blackage and people are still interested in it. When I shut my website down for a bit to focus on creating content for Matrimony Homie, people would DM me asking when I would reopen the website to the public because they were looking to place an order. You won’t need to wait much longer though, the website is relaunching this summer.

To anyone that is a fan of the brand, please know that Care Blackage is truly a love letter from me to you. I sourced the items, I used to handwrite each note individually, and each box has been hand packed [and sometimes hand stamped!] with care.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

That just because I can do everything, doesn’t mean that I should.

I launched this as a passion project and thought that I would only be doing it for about 2 weeks. As with any unfunded business, money was tight when I first started out, so when people encouraged me to make it a legitimate business, I had to file the LLC, submit the trademark, and build the website all on my own. Youtube University is helpful, but it’s not sustainable if you’re looking to scale.

I delagated and learned the hard way that you can’t always trust people to do something that your hired them for with the same level of care that you would complete the task with. While outsourcing is important, who you outsource tasks too is even more important. If possible, have people complete a sample task prior to working with them so that they’ve already showed you their baseline and are less likely to submit anything of lesser quality.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

All of the time. That’s what business it.

You’re putting fires out everywhere, and trying your best to bandaid solutions until you can come up with a new system. I remember early on I express ordered shipping boxes from overseas, and I paid a CRAZY amount of money for these boxes because they were being expedited. The boxes didn’t arrive in time and the vendor showed no remorse, and honestly I still had a time sensitive corporate order to ship out.

I went to go to damn near every staples in NYC [thank the Lord they still have brick and mortar locations] and purchased boxes and hand stamped them myself with the Care Blackage logo. It wasn’t fun, but at the end of the day, my client doesn’t care that I had a shipping issue with my box vendor. They placed an order and I was determined to get it shipped out in time.

When it comes to your business and your brand, do whatever you have to do to protect it. Make sure that customers are excited about shopping with you so that they’re likely to shop with you again.

Contact Info:

• Website: careblackage.com
• Instagram: careblackage
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/courtneyheywood/