Ingrid Best is building a wine business with a difference: she gave five Black and brown women equity, giving them a stake in the company’s success.
Her approach reflects a bigger conversation about how Black women can build lasting businesses and create opportunities for others.
At the She Did That. Founder Forum, on October 5th, Best joined Kokomo co-founder Ria Graham and My Happy Flo founder Necole Kane to explore what it means to build a legacy that extends beyond one’s own success.
Ingrid Best founded IBest Wines. Early on, she handed equity to five Black and brown women. Nobody made her do it and nobody was asking. She describes the move as continuous with work she had already been doing elsewhere.
“I discovered that I had always been pouring an entrepreneurial spirit into building in my previous work,” she said.
Ria Graham co-founded the Brooklyn restaurant Kokomo with her husband Kevol Graham, and opened it during the pandemic, which is roughly the worst possible time to open a restaurant. She is blunt about what that cost at home.
“Balance doesn’t exist,” she said. “There are going to be moments when the business needs more attention than our children.”
Necole Kane founded My Happy Flo, a menstrual health supplement company. Before that she built the Necole Bitchie blog and then the xoNecole platform, which means she spent years with her own name on the door.
“I can’t have my name on anything else I do in the future,” she said.
Put those three statements next to each other and a pattern shows up that founder coverage usually misses. The equity went out before it had to. The restaurant got honesty instead of a balance myth. And the woman with the most recognizable personal brand of the three wants the next company to carry something other than her name.
That is three women optimizing for the thing lasting rather than the thing being theirs. It is also a quieter kind of ambition than the one that gets written about, because it does not produce a profile with one face on it.
