Walk into almost any beauty supply store in a Black neighborhood, and you’ll likely shop products made for us, marketed to us, and purchased almost exclusively by us but rung up by someone who doesn’t look like us. Not by accident. By design, and by decades of decisions that had nothing to do with us being in the room.
This isn’t a conversation about blame. It’s a conversation about capital, access, and the difference between spending power and ownership. And if we’re serious about generational wealth, we have to be willing to look at the whole picture.
It Started With Access to Capital
After the Immigration Act of 1965 opened the door to a new wave of Korean immigrants, many arrived with modest savings, often pooled through informal community lending circles, a practice called kye, where family and community members rotate contributions to fund each other’s ventures. That capital wasn’t enough to buy into wealthy commercial corridors. But it was enough to open a small retail shop in a neighborhood where rent was low and demand was high.
Beauty supply stores and nail salons were a natural fit: low overhead, no need for deep English fluency, no U.S. credentialing required. A real, accessible entry point into small business ownership.
Meanwhile, Black entrepreneurs looking to do the exact same thing in our own neighborhoods, selling to our own community, ran into a wall that’s been extensively documented: disproportionate difficulty accessing small business loans, even when creditworthiness was equal. Not a perception. A pattern, backed by economic research, that has shaped who gets to build wealth through ownership and who gets left renting shelf space in their own community.
Vacuum Was Already Here
Let’s be honest about how the vacuum got created in the first place. Decades of redlining, white capital flight, and disinvestment left Black neighborhoods underserved by banks, retailers, and mainstream commerce.
Big chains didn’t want to be here. That created a gap in unmet demand for goods and services, and someone was going to fill it.
Supply Chain Built to Keep Us Out
This is the part that doesn’t get talked about enough. Starting in the 1960s and 70s, Korean-American business owners built specialized import and wholesale networks specifically for Black hair care wigs, weaves, extensions, and relaxers, much of it manufactured in South Korea. Over decades, that network became tightly knit: importers, distributors, and store owners connected through shared community and family ties.
It meant that a Black entrepreneur with capital and vision would be trying to break into a distribution system that had been closing ranks for two generations.
What This Has Cost Us
The Black hair and beauty industry is a multi-billion-dollar market, driven almost entirely by our own spending. We are the customer base. We are the culture that created the demand. And still, ownership at the retail and distribution level remains overwhelmingly outside our hands.
This tension has spilled into the streets before boycotts in New York and Los Angeles in the late 80s and early 90s, the devastating events of the 1992 LA uprising, where Korean-owned stores bore the brunt of decades of unaddressed economic frustration. That pain was real. But pain without a plan doesn’t build wealth. It just burns down the block and leaves the vacuum right where we found it.
Call to Ownership
Here’s what I want us to sit with: outrage is not a strategy. Ownership is.
People are doing the work right now, pushing to shift ownership patterns in this exact industry. That’s the model.
Economic freedom is about who profits when we spend. It’s about generational wealth that doesn’t reset every time a new business plan is written.
We are the demand. It’s time we became the supply too.
P.S. If this resonated with you, I would love for you to subscribe to my YouTube channel, where I share more resources on starting and growing a business. https://www.youtube.com/@TransformationAgentBlackWomen
