We are lucky to catch up with Kiera Gardner and Margo Newkirk, owners of Blend of Soul recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Kiera and Margo thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
Wow! Where do we begin? We always love to tell our funny story of how Blend of Soul was created and our WHY, so we hope you enjoy! Our journey began by visiting a local food hall in our community and noticing that there were limited healthy food options. It was a beautiful sunny day in Raleigh, NC, and we were riding down I-40 listening to BOSS by Beyonce and Jay-Z when Margo and I came up with the idea of creating our own freshly squeezed cold-pressed juices. Blend of Soul is all about healthy food, fresh cold-pressed juices, and encouraging our community to live a healthy lifestyle with a little taste of soul. We pride ourselves by using all-natural ingredients, tasty flavors, and a unique blend of soul in everything that we create. What makes us unique? We design each recipe with taste and feeling first, not price. If we don’t love it, we won’t create it. Our love for juicing was inspired by vowing to life a healthier lifestyle, but also making it cost effective! Eating healthy should not break the bank, so we wanted to create products that were affordable for our community, and that also incorporated natural ingredients with a unique, funky blend. Blend of Soul isn’t just our company name, it’s a vibe. Soul is in our roots. It’s who we are. Soul connects people from different walks of life, and through our culture, our roots, and our passion for healthy living, we hope to continue teaching and creating long lasting experiences with each of our customers through our delicious food and juices! Our goal is to build a legacy within our community, while encouraging a healthy and affordable lifestyle. This is what birthed Blend of Soul!
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 background and context?
We are Margo and Kiera and we make up the vibrant, soul-centered female love duo, Blend of Soul! We are a black owned and female led juice company inspired by the love that we have for our community. We sell fresh cold-pressed juices and wellness shots made with love. Our juices are 100% natural containing fresh ingredients sourced locally from farmers within our community, and with no added sugars! Our brand is about culture, community, love in all forms, wellness, inclusivity, unity, and soul. We strive every single day to be the best that we can be and pour our souls into what we love to do. Our purpose is to provide healthy alternatives to our community with a little taste of soul.
Through our brand, we hope to create a legacy within our community by encouraging a healthy and affordable lifestyle. We hope that our brand introduces our customers to the beauty of juicing! Zeroing in on what we put into our bodies is one of the foundational elements of health and wellness, and we hope that through our brand, we can continue to educate and expound on this concept through our passion for juicing. Food and drink are huge in the African American community. It gives our community a sense of comfort that we, even if just for a moment, don’t have to focus on the disparities outlined for us within this world. We want our customers to have that same feeling when indulging in our products; joy, comfort, resiliency, strength, love, unity, and happiness. Our appreciation and love for our blackness has helped us create products that not only taste amazing, but allows us to create in safe spaces for those that look like us.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
“Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise. I rise. I rise.”- Maya Angelou. This quote embodies what makes us the most proud of our business and what also illustrates our resilience in building our brand. We are proud of our passion for standing by our blackness and standing true in our skin. We honor and draw strength from our resilient ancestors to create the magic that we make to keep our community healthy, and we keep this close to our hearts throughout the hardships, the wins, the tears, and the joy. This is our purpose. This is our history, and we are not afraid to be authentically us. As a self-funded black owned business, gaining the necessary capital to start our business was extremely difficult. Access to business resources, capital, and business loans were so hard to gain because we were new business owners, and our brand is such a specific niche, so when starting our business, it was really hard to find mentorship and guidance in our speciality. We made many mistakes, but through those mistakes, we gained learning lessons that we will use to encourage other business owners of color along their journey in becoming entrepreneurs.
Our biggest accomplishment to date is meeting the beautiful and amazing Tabitha Brown while vending at the Healthy, Whole and Living Out My Dreams Women’s Conference. Meeting Tabitha Brown was nothing short of a dream for us because not only was she a black woman from NC with big dreams like us, but she tried our juices and loved them! Tabitha listened to us as we poured out our passions and our goals for our business, and our WHY. One big takeaway that we will carry with us throughout our journey is to not only stay true to ourselves and our purpose, but to be obedient and allow ourselves to be God’s vessel. She emphasized to us that everyone will not see nor understand our vision, but if we align ourselves with God’s purpose for our lives, He will bless us abundantly. This was a moment that we will never forget and continues to be our reason for creating the work that we do for our community especially through the hardships.
Our daily mantra when we are unsure of ourselves or we feel defeated is a quote by editorial designer, Dominique Webb, “Everything that I want, wants me back. Everything that I need, I already have.”
How did you build your audience on social media?
Our audience began first with family, friends, and co-workers! We pitched our idea to our village, and they loved it! We then gained the confidence to build a social media presence and our strongest and consistent audience has been through Instagram. We call our social media community our Soul Tribe, and it just stuck ever since! We wanted to create an authentic community and a fun, safe space to talk about not only juicing, but important matters in the world. Before we are your favorite juice queens, we are also Black, queer women navigating in a society that is not designed for us to win. Our brand is not just about blending juice, but it also highlights our passion for creating a blended community.
We want our brand to be a safe space for people to communicate with us, to converse with one another. We see our brand as the blending of souls outlining the beauty and uniqueness of being different. We want to highlight to our community through our brand and through social media that we may all be different, but you matter. Your voice matters. Through our social media, we create a melting pot of love, inclusivity and joy!
Our biggest advice that we would give anyone as you build a social media presence is be yourself! Creating a truly authentic brand and telling a story through your posts, photos, and videos really captures your audience beyond your products. Your community doesn’t want to be “sold to”. Let your brand speak for itself. What are you passionate about? What changes would you like to see in your community? Who are you beyond the brand?
Contact Info:
- Website: www.blendofsoul.com
- Instagram: @blendofsoulnc
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/blendofsoul
Image Credits
Tayla Berry of CloudTenPhotography, Whitney Daniel, and Saudia Furcron of The FEMM Agency