Ulta Beauty is the latest company to partner with the 15 Percent Pledge, a non-profit organization that encourages retailers to highlight and support Black-owned brands.
, sprung from the collective grief and exasperation following the death of George Floyd. She started off last May with a handwritten entreaty—“OK, here is one thing you can do for us”—before laying out her off-the-cuff idea. “I am asking you to commit to buying 15% of your products from Black-owned businesses,” she wrote of her vision to see representation on shelves commensurate with American demographics.
“I’m very emotional about it,” said James by phone last week, a couple days ahead of the anniversary. She acknowledged that everyone has grappled with their own set of realities this past year. In her case, “there hasn’t been a day in the past 363 days that I haven’t worked relentlessly on this,” said James, who also oversees her accessories line and is at work on a forthcoming memoir.
Ulta’s formal partnership with the 15 Percent Pledge follows steady groundwork in this direction, including an internal commitment earlier this year to double its assortment of Black-owned brands. explained in a call last week, this effort is a multi-pronged approach that goes beyond simply clearing shelf space for new brands. “It’s not just, ‘Okay, We launched it and we’re done.’ No, we’ve got to build that ecosystem to continue to support,” she said.
To James, this shift in some ways feels specific to beauty—an industry that historically failed to cater to women of color, whether with shade ranges or products for natural hair. (She calls out the new beauty line
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