Earlier this week, I was joined on stage at the Fast Company Innovation Festival by a diverse group of founders—all of whom have built companies that center their culture, to great success. Following a $27.5 million investment led by Danny Meyer, Tacombi is in the process of expanding to 75 locations across the U.S. The eponymous fashion label Busayo is carried by major retailers, from Nordstrom to Saks Fifth Avenue, and its Nigerian-inspired designs have been worn on the red carpet by the likes of Madonna and Lupita Nyong'o. As of this year, Nguyen Coffee Supply’s Vietnamese coffee beans are available at Whole Foods locations in 45 states. And DIVE Studios has become the go-to media brand for global K-pop fans, drawing about 70 million unique viewers each month and even spawning a standalone mental health audio platform.
“We’ve been able to create this safe space for the artists and the fans,” said Brian Nam, the cofounder and CEO of Dive Studios. “So we took it one step further and were like: ‘How do we get public figures to use their platform and influence for good?’ We started having K-pop stars and artists here in the U.S. talk about their own mental health struggles.”
But scaling these businesses can also bring unique challenges, along with complex questions about how to share culture without diluting it. Here’s what the other panelists had to say:
“You're faced with so much pressure as you grow your business,” said Dario Wolos, the founder and CEO of Tacombi. “To go back to who you were at the beginning and always remind yourself to look at those organizing principles [is] just so fundamental in the process of scaling.”
“What is my responsibility as a maker to teach you about the cultural roots of what you're wearing [and] how it was made?” said Busayo Michelle Olupona, the founder of Busayo. “As we expand to a wider audience, I don't ever want to be the agent of cultural appropriation… being able to share our own African special sauce of making clothes is really important, and I want other people to be able to wear it. However, we do have particular motifs [and] prints that are specific to us and specific to kind of a cultural presentation—and I'm very careful about that.”
“There's also this culture of: How do we treat people? How do we engage with people? How do we make people feel heard and empowered?” said Sahra Nguyen, founder and CEO of Nguyen Coffee Supply. “And those are universal human values that anyone can connect with, whether or not you're Vietnamese or Asian American.”
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