We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Orion Brown. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Orion below.

Orion, appreciate you joining us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

How did I start BlackTravelBox? Well it’s actually a story of ongoing frustration. I’ve been to nearly 20 countries and every time I travel I have the same issue of how I’m gonna keep my regular beauty routine in check while I’m on the road. The time that I actually considered creating a branding a business around it was a trip to Japan. I planned everything down to a T and having naturally curly hair I had a very clear roadmap for how my Wash N Go would take me through the 12 day journey. But just a couple days into the trip we went from beautiful mild springtime and cherry blossoms in Tokyo to basically the arm pit of hell in Okinawa. It’s a beautiful island but my goodness it was so hot and humid. My hair was instantaneously done and I had nowhere that I could find products that would work for textured hair. And not just locally I was popping around to various bases to see what the American markets had. But none of them had products that were clean safe and actually made for me. So that was really the start. I was so absolutely frustrated that I started to do the research to see who made this brand that I had in my mind as a black traveler. I knew there must be someone doing it. But after months of research I made the startling realization that no one was looking at the black travel market and especially not from a beauty perspective. So about six months later after ranting about the problem over more brunches and phone calls than I can count. I decided to register the company. In my mind if the government knew that I was working on this business belong to me then I actually had to do work on it rather than just talk about it. So I sat down came up with a legal entity name and registered it on the spot August 14, 2017. I didn’t have a product or really anything else other than the Black Travel Box LLC. From there I really took time to imagine what I wanted the business to do in the world and what I want at the brand to stand for. So it really came from a place of brand foundation. I started to tease out with the potential mission vision and values are, and then really starting to think about how I would visually like the brand to show up in the world. So one of the first things I did was went online to up work and started vetting designers so I could find someone to partner with me on creating a visual design aesthetic for BlackTravelBox. In tandem with that I was doing quite a bit of consumer insights work to better understand who our potential customer is and what they might be interested in product wise. This was in the form of surveys 101 interviews and honestly a lot of harassing of my poor friends. But it really helped us to create an initial look of what products are the most polarizing and challenging for black travelers and what specifically about them made them so difficult to use. That fit into initial product ideas which then connected back to brand aesthetic and design. We began to take the initial set of product ideas and apply design principles to them so that we could come up with essentially a visual markup of what these products might be. We also looked at deeper dives into things like ingredients and efficacy. Taking time to do max diff studies to understand what’s most important to consumers. Much of this was shoestring even if it sounds fancy. There’s some great tools out there that if you know enough about how to conduct research can be very scrappy and get you a lot of great data. From there we built a Shopify website and try to bring in both the design aesthetic the brand personality and foundations as well as the key benefits and reasons to believe around the product into one template that could cover it all. That was our beta and it continue to be iterated over essentially a 2-3 year period. Of course there have been a lot of bumps and bruises along the way. While my experience in running brands globally from a corporate perspective is very handy it really didn’t help me when it came down to mailing my first order. I literally had to learn how to fill a package. So along the way I’ve learned a lot of coding built our website learn a lot about operations and logistics from a bootstrapped company perspective and really have continued to refine out what the idea of BlackTravelBox is and how we present that to the world Both with prefer investors and with consumers. And it’s an ongoing process. But the act of launching BlackTravelBox has been just that an ongoing process. With Covid putting a huge damper on out of home we essentially paused and reassessed and are now coming back into a place of thinking about how we launch the brand in a more holistic and complete way. Now we’re looking at channel strategies and retail opportunities along with hospitality so now that we’ve got a really good understanding of what the brand is we need to go out and take that into the spaces and places that are most relevant for our consumers to find us.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

How did I get into consumer packaged goods? Well I am a career switcher with a number of winding paths along my career since college. I started out in banking doing internal consulting and project management for J.P. Morgan but when I began to get the urge to try something new I took a moment to understand where my strengths were and what I was interested in. That led me to go to business school and to pivot into brand management. So I spent the bulk of this new part of my career in the food and beverage industry Supporting and leading some of the best known brands out there. That was a really great basis for me to become an entrepreneur. Especially as a brand manager in companies like Kraft Foods where you own everything from the marketing which is what most people think of to the actual P&L.

Today my company BlackTravelBox creates TSA friendly personal care products made specifically for black travelers. We are only brand focused solely on creating convenient and practical on-the-go hair and skincare products for the $109.6B+ Black travel market. Our hair and skincare products are made for life on the go, with travel friendly packaging and formulations that make packing, carrying (on), and using them simple and easy. Our anhydrous balms and bars are designed to last longer, travel better, and are safe to use so the only thing our customers have to worry about is enjoying the destination. Think Away meets Glossier for Black Travel.

Honestly I’m most proud of still being here. BlackTravelBox began to come about as an idea not too long before Covid. So going through the challenges of being an underfunded underdog founder as a black woman and then beginning to create a brand that’s truly predicated on out of home use in the middle of a pandemic that kept everyone inside… All of that was Challenging to say the least. But throughout that I have heard from customers and folks all around the globe who have reached out via email social media etc. to say keep going, thank you for seeing me. So I’ve continue to push as hard as I can because I know this does need to exist in the world. And we’re still here.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

Let me just say that Shopify has single-handedly democratized e-commerce for Indy brands and business owners globally. While there are amazing platforms for creators like Etsy and drop shippers like great joy, Shopify truly brings together all of the fundamentals and tools that one needs to become a successful brand owner Selling in the digital space. So that’s what I went with. It was like $180 template which was fancy at the time and my monthly Shopify fee. And I built the core of the site over a weekend and have iterated from there. We also now have expand it to third-party sites like macys.com. But our bread and butter truly is Shopify where we can see all the analytics, how is our customer data, and continue to build learn and grow how we bring the brand to life through testing etc.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

Let me start out by saying I never wanted to be a manufacturer. Back in my days with Kraft Foods I spent a lot of time coming up with new innovations and often times our production lines just weren’t built to make them. So we worked a lot with our internal manufacturing facilities as well as external partners and Co. manufacturers to get these special products made. So in my mind when I started BlackTravelBox this is exactly what I would be doing. Unfortunately I didn’t work out that way. There are three things that were working against me. Number one no one wanted to make products for black consumers. So much so that I got blatant responses that said we don’t make products for Afro kinky hair. That was pretty disconcerting especially knowing that hair is essentially protein keratin and water. The only thing that makes my hair truly different from someone else’s is the physics of the shape of it.  And these are all things that can easily be addressed with product development as you’re starting from the beginning by making an inclusive consumer target. The second thing was I wanted to make really complex products. Our products are anhydrous which means they don’t have any water in them. That makes them really easy to use to carry on to travel with without getting any issues with TSA or spilling or anything else that makes the current offering of tiny bottles Such a pain. But that means we’re creating a lot of customization and we’re also trying to produce just a small amount of product until we can get the partnerships and opportunities to scale the brand. So for manufacturers who were interested it was very hard because they didn’t have the existing capability or funding to create that capability. And the final challenge was plain old being small. There are lots of manufacturers out there who have amazing capabilities and relationships with distributors and all kinds of wonderful infrastructure but without having a base of funding to go after these partners and to really be a contender on their radar, our pool of manufacturers became very small very quickly. So with that I just started making the product, in good faith that one day we would find the right partners to make our products and to develop out our vast pipeline that we’ve got planned for BlackTravelBox. We’re still on that journey. But since I started looking for manufactures back in 2019 the environment has changed to a much more inclusive place and manufacturers are looking to work with more indie brands  Because of the skyrocketing relevancy that Cove it brought in the beauty and personal care space. So for now we produce our own products and made small batch. But the goal is within the next year or two to either a get the machinery and capability which includes manpower in place in-house for us to do it ourselves or be go to a scaled call manufacture and begin to transition our products over to their production lines.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.blacktravelbox.com
• Instagram: @blacktravelbox
• Facebook: @blacktravelbox
• Linkedin: @blacktravelbox
• Twitter: @blacktravelbox
• Youtube: @blacktravelbox
• Other: tiktok @blacktravelbox