Your hair is different in every climate. Your voice is different in every room. You've gotten good at switching, but you've never gotten comfortable with it.

Orion Brown, founder of Black Travel Box, created her brand because the beauty industry had a simple answer for travelers like her: figure it out yourself. But building the brand meant rejection from manufacturers, facing implicit bias every time she walked into a pitch, and fighting for limited funding.

This episode explores what it looks like to stop performing long enough to ask what it's been costing you.

Topics discussed:

00:00 - Introduction
02:00 - Black Travel Box
03:49 - Where the global beauty industry is lacking
05:54 - The Starter Kit + product line
09:47 - Why she had to formulate the products herself
14:58 - From pre-med to brand manager
22:16 - Losing authenticity in corporate environments
23:53 - The Unmasking Audit
24:33 - Why she finally left corporate
32:12 - The Japan trip that started everything
35:57 - Funding challenges no one warned her about
40:10 - Implicit bias and masking your way to funding
48:20 - Trinidad Carnival + body neutrality

🔗 CONNECT WITH ORION BROWN:

https://theblacktravelbox.com/

ABOUT CULTURS:

Reaching millions annually, CULTURS champions unique cultural identity, transforming culturally fluid populations (multiethnic and/or geographically mobile people like Third Culture Kids) from being invisible outliers to originals. This includes people of culture in the rapidly growing DNA testing-fueled Not Parent Expected (NPE) community. Our world-class, veteran team of researchers and professionals spans five continents.

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Original Music by Tommy McMillion, McMillion Entertainment
Makeup by Sedrique Olsen
Styling by Sonja Henderson