Black brand owners fear Target’s DEI pullback will deter customers and limit opportunities
Kyle Frazier knows firsthand the kind of work Target has done over the years to help Black brand owners and founders like him make their way onto its shelves.
In 2018, Target accepted Frazier’s men’s grooming brand, Hue for Every Man, into the Target Takeoff Beauty Accelerator, a program for emerging beauty and personal-care brands. That led to placements in 25 Target stores for his products initially. That grew to 110 stores. While not necessarily a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative, the program gave him access to C-suite executives, sales managers and buyers at Target that would answer his questions about how to go into mass retail.
“The experience was great. I felt very supported as a founder,” Frazier said. “I felt they were welcoming all the entrepreneurs in a space that, obviously, is aspirational.” This past December, he partnered with Target again alongside his creative agency, Archtoculture — which he founded in 2022 after leaving Hue in 2019 — to keep assisting brands looking to enter the retailer’s ecosystem.
In 2021, Target made major commitments to Black-owned brands, pledging to add products from more than 500 of them to its shelves and spend more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses, such as marketing agencies, construction companies and facilities maintenance. But the company’s latest decision to walk back on some of those goals, programs and initiatives — including renaming its “supplier diversity” team to “supplier engagement” — has led founders to question the retailer’s commitment to these businesses. It has also made them ask whether their customers will want to continue to shop at the retailer. Target did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
“All the way around, it was a very strong and deep connection that was built, which is why the rollback is pretty disappointing in a lot of ways,” Frazier said. But, he added, “DEI is a door, but not the only door.”
Some brand owners and founders have feared that boycotts, as some activist groups have proposed, would jeopardize their sales and have warned customers of that risk in social media posts. “I’ve seen them kick out eight brands — not because they were Black, not because they were woman-owned and not because they were Latina-owned, but because they didn’t perform,” Melissa Butler, founder of vegan lipstick brand The Lip Bar, said in an Instagram video.
The boycotts could sever brands’ relationship with Target moving forward, reversing what has been a dream opportunity for many, the entrepreneurs warned. “Don’t allow foolishness to take us into separation and weed us out,” Tabitha Brown, founder of hair-care brand Donna’s Recipe, said on Instagram. “Sometimes that’s what they want. And in times like this, they’re telling us that.”
“A website is just one store,” The Honey Pot’s Beatrice Dixon wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Mass retail opens many doors, and that access makes a difference and sets you up for success to grow into other retailers.”
Black founders have looked to other options for distribution or visibility, including through their own websites. But Dixon said many rely on these opportunities with large retailers. She noted in her LinkedIn post that maintaining an e-commerce presence can be costly, especially for brands with products under $20, because of shipping, marketing, fulfillment and labor costs.
“So many brands have spent years pitching their companies, and they deserve to have space on shelves and have their stories and products shared with the world,” Dixon said in an email.
Some are hoping new channels will emerge that will be more centered around Black-owned brands. Tyler Ennis, a former economic development manager in New York, hopes to build something like this. On February 1, he launched BIPOC CPG, a database of 2,000 brands from underrepresented groups. He had it in the works before the DEI reversal announcements from Target and other retailers but released it earlier than planned in response. So far, it’s just a list of brands, but he imagines it could later evolve into a dedicated e-commerce platform.
“It could be part of that solution to give brands a different platform to reach consumers that’s not one of these major retailers,” Ennis said. “All retailers should understand what their commitments to diversity should mean and how strong the buying power of their consumers really are.”
For brands not yet in Target and contemplating whether to work with the company in the future, Frazier said it should depend on what they hear from customers.
“If your goal as a business or as a brand is to maximize profit, and you feel that your client base will go and support that retailer, then it makes sense,” Frazier said. “But if you feel your clientele will not support that retailer, then you need to take a deeper dive and look at other opportunities.”