Target Walmart DEI decisions could hurt Black founders

Fragrance brand Brown Girl Jane’s perfume bottles sit on shelves at Sephora near some of the most storied labels in the fashion and beauty world, including Prada and Dior.

For the Black-owned brand, getting a retailer to bet on it was just the start, Brown Girl Jane CEO and founder Malaika Jones said. She said Sephora has supported the company so it can better compete with well-known brands with huge marketing budgets and glossy celebrity endorsements.

Brown Girl Jane received a $100,000 grant last year from Sephora to help grow its business and participated in Sephora’s Accelerate program, which aims to boost founders who are people of color. Sephora spotlighted the fragrance brand in an email to customers in early February, putting it in front of potential shoppers who don’t know its name. Brown Girl Jane’s sales more than doubled after Sephora began carrying the company’s fragrances online and at select stores about a year ago.

While Sephora has put its weight behind its brand incubator, much larger retailers like Walmart and Target recently scaled back similar efforts focused on finding and funding more brands founded by people of color. Without that support from the retailers themselves, brands like Brown Girl Jane could face a tougher time getting on shelves — and succeeding once they get there.

“For small brands, but for any brands, really, it’s a constant fight for relevance and for visibility,” Jones said. “And so when you don’t have that commitment or even that understanding from the retailer side, it becomes quite difficult for small brands to survive — even when they’ve made it on shelves.”

When retailers launched supplier diversity programs — many of them in the months after police killed George Floyd in 2020 — top industry leaders including Walmart CEO Doug McMillon and Target CEO Brian Cornell spoke out about the institutional barriers that people of color face, including when financing their businesses. Now, as more retailers drop diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Black-owned brands may find it harder to clear those hurdles.

In January, Target dropped specific DEI pledges that it made four years ago after Floyd was murdered a short distance from its Minneapolis headquarters. Among those goals, the big-box retailer had committed to adding products from more than 500 Black-owned brands to its shelves or website and spending $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by 2025.

Late last year, Walmart confirmed that it was ending key diversity initiatives, including winding down the Center for Racial Equity, a nonprofit that the…