Today we’d like to introduce you to Taylor Tankson Kareem Wallace
Hi Taylor Tankson, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Tribe & Oak is a luxury home essentials brand specializing in bringing natural, vegan, and sustainable products that help reduce sensitivities caused by respiratory issues and asthma in our communities. We are luxury with a purpose.
Our journey began in early 2021, born from a deep need for connection during the isolating months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inspired by our co-founder Taylor’s personal struggles with asthma and eczema and the desire to create products that she could enjoy. For fun and connection we started candle making to find a blend that didn’t irritate Taylor’s asthma and after sharing with family and friends we decided we might have a shot at a great business idea and took the leap! And here we are 3 years later!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
A smooth road in business ownership? We wish!
Starting Tribe & Oak began as a personal solution for Taylor, but quickly evolved into something much bigger. As first-generation business owners, with full-time day jobs, this journey has been anything but easy. The challenges seem endless. Funding has been one of the biggest hurdles—since we bootstrap everything, all the money comes from our own pockets. That pushed us to get creative, especially with packaging and sourcing materials that are both accessible and affordable while staying true to our sustainable values.
Another major obstacle? Reaching our audience. As a growing brand without a team of marketers or PR professionals, we’ve been building our brand organically from the ground up. It’s slow but meaningful work, and we’ve focused on partnering with like-minded organizations and businesses to help spread the word. Every step forward is a victory, but we’re learning, adapting, and pushing through challenges daily.
As you know, we’re big fans of Tribe & Oak. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Tribe & Oak is a luxury home essentials brand dedicated to providing vegan and sustainable products at an accessible price. Our clean-burning candles are meticulously crafted from a hand blended coconut soy wax, infused with phthalate-free fragrance oils. For our body products, we use nourishing organic oils and butters, carefully avoiding nut oils to accommodate those with allergies. Every product is thoughtfully hand-blended to ensure the highest quality and efficacy
Taylor’s personal experience with sensitivities drives our commitment to offering safe and effective solutions. Partnered with co-founder Kareem, our brand aims to transform the beauty and fragrance industry by addressing real-life challenges and setting new standards for quality and sustainability. We started our business to solve a problem and with that being our guiding light we have carved out our own road in this massive industry.
We have had some amazing experiences on this journey to entrepreneurship. As first generation business owners we have been building our community to give to and learn from. We have applied for, been selected, and won amazing fellowships, accelerator programs, and even won some grants. We are proud to have completed the Our Village United accelerator program through Beyonce’s BeyGood foundation and at the conclusion we were grant winners. This was exciting because an injection of funds to a bootstrapped business was everything we wished for and we were able to obtain insurance, upgrade to custom packaging, and participate in some really exciting pop up markets. Most recently we are excited to have been selected by Shea Moisture as one of their sponsored small businesses in the small business marketplace at this years Curlfest in Brooklyn.
We hope that your readers leave knowing a bit more about who we are and why we started the business. We hope that other aspiring entrepreneurs take the leap and we can connect with future partners and retailers.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Advice is so hard to give because at every stage we are still learning.
If we had to give advice it would be to just start, and be open to still learning at every stage. We understand that we dont know it all so we signed up for accelerators and fellowships and learned to become better business owners and grow our community of business owners. We don’t wish we knew anything because it’s all apart of the journey. I mean we didn’t go in blind, we studied and learned everything we could about wax, candle making, essential oils and all of that. But we didn’t know how to run a business and we struggled, and to this day make mistakes but we have to learn and we are excited and open to it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.tribeandoakhoem.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/tribeandoak?utm_medium=copy_link
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tribeandoakhome/
