The Bobby Bones Show - Episode #1: Healthy Roots

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

Meet Yelitsa - a next-level, twenty-something entrepreneur who started her own company, Healthy Roots, to teach young black girls about natural hair. Listen to the emotional ride of starting your own company when you decide to put yourself out there, kick open doors, make connections and plant seeds. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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bringing you stories about people finding their professional stride by virtue of who they know. Whether it's breathing new life into an age-old profession, taking the reins in a family business, forging your own path with a new idea or landing the perfect job doing something you'd never before even considered. Today, reporter Otis Gray travels to Detroit to meet a young woman undertaking the challenges of being a self-made entrepreneur. At just 24 years old, Ulyza Jean Charles is in the thick of getting her startup off the ground and fielding innumerable tasks that come with it. Starting her business, healthy roots, just out of college, Yolitza's end goal is to change the world. One doll at a time. Here's Otis.

So I spent a day in the life with Yolita Jean Charles, and her job, well, she does a lot. So I think it's just best to start at the beginning. First, she wakes up at seven. She does yoga. And before she leaves the house, she has her makeup and hair routine. I'm very much a fashion over person. She's got a big day, and she wants to look good. So I have to go check out the performance service,

and then I have mentor meetings all day in like a happy hour with mentors. So I like to look presentable for that, so people can see that I'm a professional. So that's what I, that's what I'm getting ready for now. Yulita's company is called Healthy Roots. It's a toy company that teaches hair care to young girls of color with black dolls that Yulisa has designed herself. I'm going to do setting spray, and I'm going to try to do eyeliner really quick.

We do have to go in like five minutes. Also, people in Detroit drive really crazy. Oh, is that the cap? I've been looking for this. At around 8, we're out the door to start the day. Unlike a lot of young people who apply for work at big places where they might find stability, Yelitsa has gone out on a limb to start her own toy company completely from scratch. I still don't know my way around Detroit yet. Pitching a business like this and making it work is not easy.

But at 24 years old, Yelita is exceptionally good at it. Hi, my name is Yelita Jean Charles. I'm the CEO and founder of Healthy Roots. Health Roots is a toy company that creates dolls and storybooks that empower young girls of color through hairplay. I created Healthy Roots because I never had a doll that looked like me growing up. And I also didn't learn how to do my hair until I was 20. And that's crazy because I have really great hair. And there's lots of little girls with beautiful curls that don't know it yet.

So that's why we made Zoe, the first doll that teaches natural hair care. She's our first healthy root stall, and she's really cute. That's a good elevator pitch. That seems practiced and perfect. I mean, part of it is practice, but people ask me, what do you do all the time? So I have to tell them something. In the last four years, Yolita has taken the doll from an idea to an actual product. She secured some funding and is now in the process of getting more dolls out to the public

after a successful first holiday season. 90% of startups like this fail. So Yolita has completely devoted her life to her company. and is currently working out of a startup accelerator here in Detroit. Get the microphone out. In a world with a lot of reliable, stable job paths, we follow Yalita as she forges her own. Did you have a lot of dolls when you were a kid? Did I have a lot of dolls when I was a kid?

Yeah. My mom would only buy me gifts if I did something good or if she did something bad. Those were the only times I got dolls. I had this giant bin. I had, like, so many different versions of Barbie. I had Swan Lake Barbie. I had the Barbie where you could pull hair out of her head and you could cut it. I had tons of mycine dolls.

They had the coolest fashion. Then there were the brats, Betty Spaghetti. Yeah, I had a lot of dolls. A lot of dolls. Yelita is of Haitian descent. She's first generation. But like a lot of kids growing up in America, most of Yelisa's dolls growing up were white.

In a recent video that Yelita made for her website, It shows her walking through a toy aisle at a big store just to show how much lighter-skinned dolls vastly outnumbered dolls with darker skin. Elyza remembers one Christmas when she and her cousin were kids, a family member noticed that most of their dolls didn't look like them. He noticed we didn't have any black dolls and he bought us some. And I like unwrapped it and I started crying because I'm like, I didn't want this one. This is ugly.

And like I said that and they were like... You said it was ugly because it was a black doll? Not because it was a black doll, but because it was a black doll. Because it was like, to me, the doll that, like, they always show in the commercials was, like, the white one. So let's say that they had Rapunzel Barbie. They do white Rapunzel Barbie. They do white, Rapunzel Barbie. They got me the black one, and I didn't want that one because I want the one that is the popular one, which is always the white one.

Yeah. Unfortunately, Yelita's experience is not at all unique. There's been multiple studies done where young black kids sit down in front of two dolls. One is white, one is black. Then they're asked some questions. It's called the doll test, and there's videos online that you can watch just like this one. Which doll is the nice doll? The young boy in front of the camera points over to the white doll.

Which doll is the bad doll? Now, one after another, the kids point to the black doll. Which doll is the ugly dog? A young boy touches the black dog. Why is that doll ugly? Because he's black. Which dog looks most like you? Like me?

Yeah, which one looks like you? And that one? Okay. She points to the black doll. The videos can be pretty hard to watch, but they're a big part of why Yoliza does what she does at all, because her mantra is that young black kids need to see themselves represented in a positive way, because that hasn't been the case for a long,

long time. In Ulyt's experience, a lot of that had to do with her parents coming to the U.S. to give her a better future and encouraging her to just be successful. They were just like, do whatever you got to do to learn, to grow, to be successful. And for a lot of people, that looks like whiteness, like assimilating or like acting white. I actively participated in anti-blackness as a kid. I, like, didn't always play with the black kids, or, like, I didn't listen to certain music because I thought that's what black kids listened to.

I didn't watch certain things because I thought that's what black kids listened to or watched. And I did those things because I didn't want to get treated like them because I saw how they got treated. And it wasn't until I got older that I learned how problematic that was. So as a teenager, Eilita straightened her natural curls to appeal to the kind of,

European standard of beauty, straight, long hair. But there was a pivotal moment in college when she was an illustration major at Rhode Island School of Design. It was when a friend of hers, who was also black, made a pretty big decision. She had really big hair. She had cut off all her hair. And I was like, yo, what are you doing? And she was like, you know, I've just never seen my natural hair. And I was like, wow, I too have never seen my natural hair. So this experience, started really feeding into Yelita's artwork. And at one point, she was taking an illustration class and a teacher assigned them all fairy tale characters to recreate.

Yelita was assigned Rapunzel. And I redesigned her and turned her into a little black girl with kinky curly hair because I wanted to show black girls that were princesses were beautiful. We don't have to change the way that we look to be these princesses. And everyone was like, this looks like a doll. This looks like a doll. Have you thought about making a doll? I took that conversation to Facebook, and like over 100 comments later,

I realized that there was a shared experience for a lot of black women where they didn't have products that looked like them when they were growing up, specifically talking about dolls or like sharing pictures of the black dolls they did have and realizing there was an opportunity there. She came up with the name Healthy Roots and started doing heavy research into the psychological effects of toys on kids. And I ultimately learned that toys have a huge influence on children. They influence how you think, act, and see yourself. So when little black girls can't find dolls that look like them, it negatively impacts their self-esteem. And so when I created Zoe, I made her more than just a brown doll. She has hair that girls can style just like their own and learn how to not only love their hair, but take care of it properly.

Zoe, the doll that Yulita design, stands at about 18 inches tall. Zoe has these big, beautiful chocolate brown eyes and these really cute little pink lips and a little bit of blush, and she has this very round, adorable face. And she's these big, beautiful curls that frame her face. We've developed a personality for her, which is like a little sassy. and very strong will. She's very confident in herself and will not let people talk badly about her

or the way that she looks, which happens sometimes, but she can handle herself. In addition to giving her a great personality, Yelita has also written a whole backstory that makes Zoe even cooler. Her story is actually that she went through the big chop, which is what we call it when you cut off all your hair, because she went to the salon with her mom,

and she saw another woman there with these big, beautiful curls, and she was like, why doesn't my hair look like that? And so her mom helped you learn how to take care of her and they did all these hair styles, which are featured in the Big Book of Hair, which is our illustrated guide to teaching natural hair care. Her end goal with Zoe is to fight for positive racial representation, starting with when kids are formulating their ideas about the world. Which is why it's called Healthy Roots. We're getting to the root of the problem. You can stop problems by stopping it with the youth. And as long as we teach them, we can fight against it. That's what I built Healthy Roots on. Yeah, this cute doll is a tool to just. destroy racism. So, an amazing idea.

But that was just the beginning. She ended up launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund the making of the first doll. Her goal was to raise $35,000, and she ended up raising $48. I asked her what she remembers feeling now that this idea of hers was about to come to life. I don't remember being excited. I think I remember just being like, oh crap. This is real. This is really, really real.

this weight came down on me and I realized just how much work I had signed up for. We'll get back to the story in a second. First, a word from Express Employment Professionals. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done. This is you.

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Find your location at expresspros.com or on the Express Jobs app. And now back to our story. Since the beginning, Yolita has spearheaded every task that goes into starting a business from scratch. You start with your idea, check your idea, validate it, developing your product, defining your customer, defining your go-to-market strategy, I guess. figuring out how to build your product, your cost, doing your financial projection, then looking at funding, looking at building your team, thinking about your sales funnel and your marketing strategy. And on days like today, she tries to split that up into meetings with mentors.

Communicating with the people that are managing our accounts. Communicating with my factory and tying up any loose ends there. Dealing with the insurance policies for those factories. Or I'm organizing meetings with people for fulfillment. She spends a good portion of the day working on social media and marketing. And then the rest of my day is design work and illustration. which doesn't get done often because it gets pushed and pushed and pushed. So that's my day-to-day.

That is kind of the standard day-to-day for her. But now that she's part of a startup incubator here in Detroit, that comes with all sorts of new tasks and opportunities. Like today, she's part of a startup speed dating kind of event where her and other startups in the office go around and meet with successful entrepreneurs and business owners who can give advice and maybe even help Yulita with her business. It's kind of like a rapid-fire,

shark tank situation. I want you to give me like the cell. Hi, my name is Yolita Jean Charles. I'm the CEO and founder of Healthier. So my name's Steve. I've been doing engineering for 10 or 12 years. Hi, I'm Yalitza. So I have a toy company. It's called Healthy Roots. I'm the CEO of a company called Integral. We're a product consulting company. We work with our... I think you'll be a great resource. So Yolita, I have a company. It's called Healthy Roots. We make dogs that teach natural hair care. I personally don't know what it takes to start a business from scratch like Yolicea,

but being a freelance producer, I know the feeling of constantly pitching and feeling kind of like you're making up your own job as you go. Do you ever get jealous of people with normal jobs? All the time. All the time. Happiness for me is stability. I value stability over all else, which is funny because the most unstable thing you can do is try to start a business. but that's what happiness is for me.

It's like knowing where, knowing when I'm going to eat, knowing where I'm going to sleep, consistency, and balance. And like, there'll be people who reach out to me and they're like, girl, I'm thinking about quitting my job. And I was like, don't you quit that job? That's steady income. You got benefits. You got insurance.

You know what it's like to have insurance? That's great. Go get your teeth cleaned. Being a person who has quit a stable job before to do what I love, I know the liberation and empowerment of being independent and forging your own way like Yelitza. But I also know that the grass can always look greener on the other side. And while you make this big decision to go off on your own journey, you sometimes really miss the camaraderie of a normal kind of work environment.

Do you ever feel like a lone wolf in what you're doing? Always. I did a lot of this by myself. Not to say that I haven't had mentors help me or team members at the beginning that's helped me but a lot of it falls back on you when somebody else can't do it. So it is very much, very lonely.

Doing the work that I do is like a slow burn. But then there's also this chart about entrepreneurship where it's like, yay, this is awesome. Oh, no, this really sucks. Oh, look, it's good. Wait, oh, we're doing amazing. Okay, we're doing just okay. So it's like these crazy ups and downs

There's always highs and lows And what gets me through my lows It's my end goal Which is like empowering young girls of color That's my angle As long as I'm doing work To get to that point It's fine

Yelita admits that Because she's constantly in the trenches Of starting this business She can sometimes forget That childlike wonder That her company is all about But after a long day at the incubator Yelica got an email

It was this video that was sent to her by a young social media influencer. This little insanely cute black girl named Jade Robinson, who has tons and tons of followers. Jade just got her Zoe doll in the mail from Healthy Roots. So describe what we're watching. We are watching one of our little influencers do an unboxing video. She's so tiny.

She's so cute. She pretty much looks like me. Yeah. It's really cute. Wait, I'm trying to focus right now. Oh, my God. Four years after Yolita illustrated the first sketch that would become healthy roots, here it is.

It's real. It's alive. It's a actual business. It's a tangible thing that she created that's now in the hands of a young girl that she always hoped she could inspire. I ask her if when she sees this, does she finally think, I've made it? No, I don't think anything. I'm just like, oh, it's like watching a puppy. It's like, what are you thinking about?

It's just, you're just, you're. brain is sparkles and rainbows. Like, it's just, it feels good. It's just, yeah. I don't think about anything. I'm just like, oh my God, this is so cute. This is so cute. That's it. That's all I'm thinking. I'm not thinking like, oh my God, another girl has gotten our doll and she's going to become a strong independent woman. Like, no, I'm just like, wow, she looks really cute. I don't see that and go, I did it. I'm successful with this. I'm like, oh, she looks really happy. I want to make more happy kids. That's it. That's it. You can find out more about Yelita at www. healthy rootsdolls.com, where you can also see pictures of Zoe and order a doll today.

Healthy Roots' story is far from over, and Yolita is just getting started. You can also see this amazing unboxing video over at expressprose.com slash podcast. For On the Job, I'm Otis Gray. Thanks for listening to On The Job. Brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at ExpressPros.com. This season of On The Job is produced. by Audiation and Red Seat Ventures. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallins. Our producer is Otis Gray. The show is mixed by Matt Noble

at the loft in Bronxville, New York. Find us on IHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time for more inspiring stories about discovering your life's work.

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No technician needed. And it's not just a camera. It's a full ecosystem of sensors, cameras for inside and outside, and 24-7 professional monitoring. If there's ever a break-in, a fire, or a flood, SimplySafe's agents are on it immediately. They were also named America's Best Customer Service by Newsweek, which honestly tracks. Right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting SimplySafe.com, slash bones. That's half off at simplysafe.com slash bones. There's no safe like SimplySafe.

Service opens doors. And at American Military University, it can open doors for the whole family. If you have a loved one who served in the military, you may qualify for reduced tuition. AMU offers flexible online programs designed to fit your schedule so you can keep moving forward wherever life takes you. Learn more at AMU. EDU slash military. Open doors to the future for you and your family with the help of American Military University. That's AMU. APUS.edu slash military.

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