Danika Berry Featured in Forbes | Black Beauty Founders

Forbes Goes Inside Black Beauty Founders and BBF Private Access

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Forbes contributor Jasmine Browley goes inside Black Beauty Founders and BBF Private Access, and why Danika Berry believes visibility gets founders seen, but access gets them somewhere.

By Black Beauty Founders Staff

Forbes has profiled Danika Berry, Founder and CEO of Black Beauty Founders, in a feature by contributor Jasmine Browley. The story, Inside The Network Getting Millennial Founders To Decision-Makers, published August 26 and looks at how Berry is helping a new generation of Black beauty founders turn attention into lasting business.

QUICK LINKS

Forbes Inside The Network Getting Millennial Founders To Decision-Makers

Inc. Emerging Beauty Brands Can’t Afford Influencer Fees

CEW Danika Berry: A Woman of the People

Byrdie Fenty Beauty’s New Foundation Is the Start of a Whole New Era

Inside the Forbes Feature

The feature opens on the idea at the center of Berry’s work. As she tells Forbes, “Visibility gets you seen. Access gets you somewhere.” After more than twenty years in beauty publicity and brand strategy, Berry describes how her role has changed: “I spent 20 years getting people into the room. Now I am building the room.”

Browley reports that this generation of founders is building its own names alongside its brands, using social commerce and personal platforms to reach customers directly. Berry sees that shift every day. Today’s founders, she says, are “much more comfortable creating their own access instead of waiting for somebody to invite them in.”

Inside BBF Private Access

Forbes also takes readers inside BBF Private Access, the members-only side of the Black Beauty Founders ecosystem. Rather than centering on press coverage, Private Access is built around introductions, connecting founders with retailers, investors, private bankers, live shopping platforms, casting directors and media executives.

Berry told Forbes that two featured founders have already drawn interest from a retailer and a prospective investor. Her goal for every founder is clear: “I want somebody who can affect what happens next to know her name.”

Building the Room

Berry spent more than twenty years in beauty, celebrity and sports publicity, producing unscripted television for the OWN Network and building a PR career that served brands including Mielle, CURLS and Camille Rose. In 2023 she created National Black Beauty Founders Day, observed every August 30, and Black Beauty Founders grew into a national trade platform and private ecosystem connecting Black beauty founders with the retailers, investors and corporate leaders shaping the business of beauty. Forbes reports that BBF reaches more than 3,000 founders and industry professionals.

The feature also carries the advice Berry gives founders as they grow. “It can actually be easier to make the money than it is to keep the business capable of making it,” she says. And when a major retailer calls before a brand is ready, she reminds founders that “the smartest answer to a major retailer is not no.” Sometimes, it is “not yet.”