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and to be honest, this is the right question if your goal is to build a successful haircare brand. this is the question that has produced thousands of successful beauty and haircare brands when the approach is to 1) identify a consumer problem, 2) formulate a product, 3) design a bottle, 4) build a campaign and launch it. rinse and repeat.

I’ve done it too because that was the normal thing to do, and everywhere you look in beauty that’s how it goes, that is THE playbook. but I no longer think it’s the most interesting way to capture attention or consumers in general, personally speaking. everywhere I look, most beauty brands are doing the same type of marketing, especially in the textured hair category. wash day, twist-out, wash n go and to capture the Black audience we’ll grease scalps or talk about protective styling. the brands with capital might collab with an influencer or someone in popular culture on a campaign. to be relatable the founder joins the team and performs social media challenges. no offense but I am not the audience for that style, it never feels authentic to me.

I do not want to have to do social media challenges and perform antics so you can see me in my humanity. they are not an organic part of my personality. so the question I’ve become obsessed with is: “how do we build a culturally indispensable brand for people who happen to buy shampoo?”

when the goal is simply to sell shampoo, the product sits at the center of every decision you make and everything else exists to support that growth. the photography supports the product, the campaign supports the product, the influencer supports the product and eventually the entire company starts orbiting a bottle until the next product surfaces.

I’m no longer interested in putting the bottle at the center, it honestly never brought me much joy. good ingredients and formulas are everywhere and too many are making the same marketing claims anyway. according to brands, every product works. so why do consumers need another brand?

I’m much more interested in making people want to participate in something. because textured hair has never existed in isolation. it has always existed inside of a much larger world of people, rituals, places, objects, and ideas.

once I made that decision, I stopped looking at beauty companies for inspiration and started visiting and studying museums, publishing, restaurants, architecture, agriculture, ceramics, fashion, cinema, home and the ways culture gets documented before it gets commercialized.

everywhere you turn, folks are lamenting about the algorithm. creators are saying instagram is dead, but it has become my main inspiration platform since I changed my algorithm. I have learned great content will always find it’s audience. my favorite instagram pages to get lost in right now are Zara Home, Soft Edge Studio and Theodora Brooklyn, my feed is now truly global! you will notice that none of them sell shampoo, but all of them leave something behind. culture and storytelling while supporting commerce.

I no longer want to make products that disappear when they’re empty. I want to make work that people remember even after they’ve forgotten what was inside the bottle. work that people can FEEL and see themselves in. work that connects us all at the core. this has changed the kind of questions I ask. and where I go deeper into my creative flow.

this time around, I’m less interested in what an ingredient claims to do than I am in why it mattered before the beauty industry commercialized it.. who grew it? who cooked with it? who carried it across oceans? why has it survived for generations? what stories are already attached to it before marketing gets involved? does it actually absorb into the scalp and strands? how do we make it more effective?

those questions don’t replace formulation, they make the formulation more meaningful and I’ve started thinking about products differently because of that. I don’t think the product is the whole story, I think it’s the artifact. it is the physical evidence that a much larger body of work exists.

I am just as interested in the farm as the laboratory, the kitchen as the photoshoot, the gallery card as the packaging, the documentary as the campaign. none of those things exist to distract from the product. they exist because the product is only one expression of the idea.

the companies I admire most don’t simply sell products, they leave behind a way of seeing. they build worlds people want to return to, and the products are simply one way into that world.

it feels like we’ve accepted a version of beauty where the highest ambition is convincing someone to buy something. I’m no longer asking myself how to build another beauty brand. I’m asking how to build something people want to belong to, and would miss if it disappeared, there’s a difference. one creates customers, the other creates culture. that's the world I want to document. it is a much harder job but it’s also the only one I want.

if this sounds a little too poetic, I understand. that is the world I have been operating in and the world I am creating. hopefully it’s relatable to a few people out there because creating it makes me feel so ALIVE.

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with love,

-Julian Addo

over nearly a decade of building a Black-owned business in America, I began noticing a pattern. it happened across industries, across companies, and across relationships. at first, I treated each experience as an isolated incident. eventually, I realized I was watching the same mechanism play out again and again.

it wasn’t accidental. many of the companies that I came in contact with or did business with, assigned adwoa beauty a Black or brown person to be my account manager. allow me to be precise about what I am describing because there are two versions of this pattern operating simultaneously. they are not the same, even though they rely on the same underlying mechanism.

the first is what I would call performative proximity.

a company assigns a Black account manager to a Black client because someone in leadership has made a calculation, conscious or not, that Black people are more comfortable being served by people who look like them. this reflects a racial assumption disguised as sensitivity. it reduces Black clients to a demographic requiring special handling instead of treating them as individuals who deserve the same quality of service regardless of who delivers it.

it also assumes Black professionals exist primarily to make other Black people feel comfortable, rather than because they are the most qualified person for the role. I have watched this happen enough times that I recognize it almost immediately. the individuals involved may not intend it. systems often do.

the second version is more calculated, and more dangerous.

here, Black and brown employees are used not simply to make a client comfortable, but to lower their defenses in situations where the company intends to extract value, shift risk, or behave in ways the client might otherwise question. the employee becomes the trust mechanism.

if the relationship later deteriorates and the client raises concerns about discrimination or predatory treatment, the company points to its diversity as evidence of good faith. “how could we be racist? we hired Black employees. we even assigned you a Black account manager”.

the same person who helped establish trust often disappears once the relationship becomes adversarial, replaced by executives or legal counsel. one recent company even terminated the Black employee who was our account manager once it was evident our relationship would not serve them in they way they hoped. I am certain the employee received a different reason for their termination.

I have lived both versions. I have also watched good people become instruments of systems they may not have fully understood. I want to name this pattern because I have not seen anyone describe it with this level of specificity in a business context.

this strategy did not originate in lending, accounting, or fintech, it has a deep history.

on December 4, 1969, at four o’clock in the morning, the Chicago Police Department raided the apartment of Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. police fired between 83 and 99 shots into the apartment. the Panthers may have fired one. Fred Hampton never woke up, he had been drugged.

the person who drugged him was William O’Neal, a 20-year-old Black man whom the FBI had recruited after arresting him several years earlier. O’Neal infiltrated the Black Panther Party, rose to become chief of security for the Illinois chapter, and earned Hampton’s trust. the night before the raid, he put secobarbital into Hampton’s drink and later provided the FBI with a detailed floor plan of the apartment, including the location of Hampton’s bedroom. the FBI did not send a white agent to infiltrate the Black Panther Party.

they sent a Black man because a Black man could get close in a way a white agent never could.

what struck me most wasn’t just what O’Neal did, it was how he became useful to the FBI. William O’Neal wasn’t born an informant. he was a young Black man arrested for stealing a car and impersonating a federal officer. the FBI didn’t simply recruit him because he was Black. they recruited him because he was vulnerable. they had leverage. that’s an important distinction.

the Bureau exploited three things simultaneously:

• his race, because it gave him access;

• his vulnerability, because it made him recruitable;

• his ambition, because becoming chief of security gave him status and belonging.

this was part of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program that operated from the 1950s through 1971. its stated objective was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” Black organizations and prevent the rise of what J. Edgar Hoover called a “Black messiah” capable of unifying the movement. between 1967 and 1971, the FBI pursued hundreds of operations targeting Black nationalist organizations. much of what we know today came not through government transparency, but through a 1971 burglary of an FBI field office and later civil litigation surrounding Hampton’s assassination.

power often works by identifying where someone is most vulnerable and turning that vulnerability into an asset for the institution. that idea extends far beyond COINTELPRO. proximity was the weapon. trust was the mechanism.

the comparison I am making is not between institutions. it is between mechanisms. different actors. different stakes. different consequences. the same underlying strategy: using someone who shares the target’s identity to gain access, establish trust, and accomplish something that would otherwise be much more difficult.

sometimes that strategy is deliberate. sometimes it emerges from institutional assumptions no one stops to question. either way, the structure remains remarkably consistent. what I want founders and business leaders to understand is this: the face across the table does not tell you whose interests are being served. representation is not the same thing as alignment. shared identity is not due diligence.

looking back, there were signs I didn’t yet know how to read. the account manager who was warm and available during onboarding, then suddenly unreachable when something went wrong. the company that highlighted its Black employees the moment concerns about fairness were raised.

the investor who assumed my network consisted primarily of other Black founders and routed every introduction accordingly, as though my business belonged only in rooms that looked like me.

the institution that positioned shared identity as the reason I should trust them instead of their track record, their incentives, or the terms of the deal itself. these are not always signs of malicious intent. sometimes they are symptoms of systems that have internalized assumptions about who Black people are, what we need, and where we belong. but assumptions, even unconscious ones, can produce predictable outcomes.

pattern recognition is the only defense against a strategy designed to bypass it. you have to learn the pattern before you encounter it, not after. I learned it after. I’m telling you now so maybe you won’t have to.

with love,

— Julian Addo

with adwoa beauty, trademarking was straightforward. adwoa is an Akan name that virtually nobody outside of West African culture was using or even pronouncing correctly before 2017. the only public figure associated with the name was British supermodel Adwoa Aboah. the hashtag on social media was clean. the USPTO search came back clear. I attempted to file myself, hit a snag, hired an attorney, and got it done for somewhere between $1,100 and $1,500. the process was relatively simple because the name was culturally specific and uncommon in the English-speaking market.

this time around is different. the brands I am building use ordinary English words, and that changes everything about how trademark protection works and what questions you need to be asking before you spend a single dollar on filing.

the US operates on what is called a common law trademark system, which means that the moment your LLC sells one branded product, a bottle, a jar, a piece of merch, anything with your brand name on it, you automatically acquire what is called a common law trademark. no government filing required, no fee, no waiting period. the trademark exists the moment you make your first sale under that name.

but it does get a bit complicated. with the US’s common law jurisdiction, someone else could have been selling a product under a name similar to yours for the last three years without ever filing a single paper with the government. they would not appear in the USPTO database. they would not show up in any official trademark registry. but they would have prior common law trademark rights, and if their name is similar enough to yours and their product is related enough to yours, they can sue you and win, even though neither of you have a registered trademark.

let me make that concrete with an actual example. say your brand is called TEXTUR. you go to the USPTO database and search in class 3 (the trademark classification that covers cosmetics and cleaning preparations, where shampoos, conditioners, hair treatments, and skincare products all live). the USPTO organizes trademarks into 45 international classes based on the type of goods or services, and a registration only protects you within the class or classes you file under. a brand called TEXTUR that sells clothing would file in class 25, not class 3, and in theory both marks can coexist because they cover different categories. but if the marks are similar enough and the goods are related enough in the eyes of a consumer, an examiner or a court can still find a conflict even across classes. class is a starting point, not a definitive answer.

so you search class 3 and find nothing. you think you are clear. but there is a woman in Vermont who has been selling a haircare product called TEKSTURE for two years and never filed anything with the government. she does not need to, she has prior common law rights. the names are spelled differently but they are phonetically almost identical and the products are in the same category. if she sues you, she wins. you would be required to rebrand regardless of the fact that you searched the database and found nothing.

that is how the US trademark system actually works, and most founders, including me, until this call, do not fully understand it.

this is why my attorney told me the first question every founder needs to answer before doing anything else is not “can I register this name” but rather “can my LLC use this name as a trademark without losing a trademark infringement lawsuit?” those are two completely different questions and the answer to one tells you almost nothing about the answer to the other.

to get that answer, my attorney performs what he calls a use and registerability search, two separate analyses that are often counterintuitive when you see the results side by side.

the use search asks: if your LLC starts selling branded product tomorrow, what are the odds that someone with prior common law rights to something phonetically or visually similar is going to sue you and win? he searches not just the USPTO database but the open internet, Google, Amazon, marketplaces, anywhere a brand might exist without ever having filed a government document. the result comes back as a probability: you have a 30% chance of losing a trademark infringement lawsuit, or you have a 70% chance, and then you as the CEO make a decision about how much risk you are willing to bear before you fall in love with a name and print it on a bottle.

the registerability search asks a completely separate question: if you file a trademark registration application with the USPTO, what are the odds the examining attorney will approve it? and here is where it gets counterintuitive. you could have a 30% chance of losing an infringement lawsuit, meaning the name is relatively safe to use in the marketplace but only a 10% chance of getting it registered. or you could have an 80% chance of getting it registered but a 70% chance of losing an infringement lawsuit if someone with prior common law rights comes for you. the two analyses move completely independently of each other because what happens in the real marketplace and what happens at the trademark office are governed by different standards.

what makes the registerability analysis even less predictable is that trademark examiners at the USPTO exercise significant personal judgment. two examiners can look at the same application and reach different conclusions about whether a prior mark is too similar to yours. one examiner might find your mark and a prior mark phonetically distinct enough to coexist. another might cite the prior mark and issue what’s called an office action, essentially a letter saying your application is blocked, forcing you or your attorney to file a response arguing why the examiner is wrong. that response costs additional time and money, and there is no guarantee it succeeds. this is why the registerability percentage your attorney gives you is a probability, not a promise, and why having an attorney who has argued these responses before matters as much as the initial filing. the use and registerability search costs $500 or less.

so before you fall in love with a name, before you announce it publicly, before you print it on a single bottle or file a single government document, do these three things in this order.

1. first, search the USPTO database at USPTO.gov for your exact name and phonetic variations in the classes relevant to your product category. this takes thirty minutes and costs nothing. it will not catch common law conflicts but it will tell you immediately if there is a registered mark that is an obvious problem.

2. second, search the open internet, Google, Amazon, Etsy, TikTok Shop, Instagram for your name and any phonetic or visual variations you can think of. you are looking for brands that might have prior common law rights that would never appear in a government database. this is the search most founders skip entirely and the one that creates the most expensive problems later.

3. third, hire a trademark attorney to conduct a formal use and registerability search before you commit to the name publicly. the search costs $500 or less with the right attorney. the rebrand after you’ve printed 10,000 units, built a following, and filed your LLC under that name costs significantly more, in money, in time, and in the kind of public confusion that is very hard to walk back.

the $500 search is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy in the life of your brand. spend it before you need it.

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with love,

— Julian Addo

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the new luxury item is a legal defense fund. money set aside specifically and only to retain counsel. not to touch for anything else, not for emergencies, not for medical bills, not for your cousin who needs help. a separate account, growing quietly, that exists for one purpose, when this system comes for you, and in this country, for Black people, it is when, not if, you can fight back with someone in your corner who actually has the time and the motivation to win.

I know this from experience.

when Aurous Financial filed a lawsuit against my company, my manufacturers, and me personally in New Jersey, with no personal guarantee in existence and no legal basis to name me individually (the company or anyone), no legal basis for a lawsuit, the strategy was not to win in court. the strategy was to drain me. file enough motions, create enough chaos, freeze enough assets, threaten enough manufacturing and warehouse partners, that by the time I needed to retain counsel to defend myself, I wouldn’t have the money to do it. they would get a default judgment. I would lose my business, my assets, and potentially my personal finances, not because they were right, but because I couldn’t afford to show up. them and their team of lawyers now surveil my substack to find gotcha moments they can use as exhibits, and to attempt to file a “defamation” lawsuit against me for sharing my own story. actually, they’re here right now and likely will always be.

the company filed for bankruptcy relief, it didn’t stop it for other reasons you can ascertain from my published articles, however it may have altered their plans. now it is left up to a trustee to review their claims appropriately, for the 1st time ever. what happened to me in business is the same thing that happens to Black people in the criminal justice system every single day, at a scale that should make all of us furious.

more than 60% of people sitting in American jails right now have not been convicted of a crime. they are there because they cannot afford bail. the median bail on a felony case is $10,000. nearly 40% of Americans cannot cover a $400 emergency expense. you do not need a degree in mathematics to understand what happens when those two numbers meet.

Black defendants receive bail amounts that are on average $14,376 higher than white defendants charged with the same crimes. young Black men are 50% more likely to be detained pretrial than white defendants. and the part that rarely gets said clearly is that pretrial detention does not just keep you in jail while you wait for your day in court, it determines the outcome of your case. people who cannot afford bail are more likely to be convicted. they are more likely to accept plea deals for crimes they did not commit because the alternative is sitting in a cage while their life falls apart on the outside. they are more likely to receive longer sentences. the inability to pay does not just inconvenience you, it decides your future.

this is not an accident. this is the architecture of a system that has always counted on Black people not being able to afford to fight back. and in 2025 and 2026, that architecture got a renovation. the federal agencies that existed to at least nominally enforce anti-discrimination law are being dismantled. the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has dropped cases. regulations that took decades to build are being rolled back by executive order. legal advocates are describing what is happening right now as a generational void in civil rights enforcement. which means the already thin layer of institutional protection that existed between you and the system has gotten thinner. which means the argument I am making in this post is not theoretical. it is the present tense. (source)

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so here is what I am asking you to do. start a legal defense fund. TODAY. call it whatever you want in your budgeting app. call it the fight back fund. call it the attorney retainer. call it the thing nobody told you to build until you needed it. but start it and treat it like a bill, not like a goal. something that gets funded every month before you think about anything else discretionary.

if you have a business, the minimum is $25,000. that gets you through an initial retainer with a competent attorney for most disputes. $50,000 gives you real staying power. $100,000 means you can fight something serious without having to choose between your legal defense and keeping the lights on. and I say this knowing that those numbers feel impossible for most people, which is exactly why building toward them slowly, consistently, over years, before you need them, is the only path.

if you do not have a business, the math is different but the principle is the same. police brutality. workplace discrimination. housing discrimination. a landlord who knows you can’t afford to sue. a predatory contract you signed because you didn’t have a lawyer review it. a traffic stop that went wrong. a family member who needs representation and can’t get it. these things happen to Black people in America with a regularity that the rest of this country has decided to call isolated incidents. they are not isolated. they are the system operating as designed. and the system has always been most effective against the people who cannot afford to disrupt it.

I know saying this can be controversial but, Black people should sue more. I mean that seriously and strategically. not frivolously. not out of anger but when there is a legitimate wrong, when there is discrimination, when there is a contract breach, when there is police misconduct, when there is a predatory lender who freezes your inventory and threatens your partners and tries to take your business by burying you in legal fees, you should sue. you should document everything. you should retain counsel and you should pursue it.

settlements exist. verdicts exist. accountability exists, but only for the people who can afford to demand it. the reason it so rarely happens for us is not that the cases aren’t there. it is that fighting costs money we were never told to save. I have been told this directly, by many people who have benefited from that dynamic for a very long time.

forty acres and a mule is not coming, we have known that for a long time. but a judgment, a settlement, a verdict, those are real, those are transferable and those build something. and every time a Black person or a Black business fights back and wins, it costs this system something it does not want to pay, which is the only language it has ever understood.

one more thing: the quality of your attorney matters as much as having one. you can pay a retainer for a bad attorney and still lose everything. that is why you identify the right counsel before you need them, not after. not a business attorney for contracts and IP, though you need that too. I am talking about top litigators. I am talking about criminal defense attorneys. I am talking about people who fight for a living and win. have their number in your phone before anything happens. because when something happens, you will not have time to find them.

when Beyonce said “my momma, my lawyer, my shield”. when Jay Z said “whips and chains are cool to cop but what’s most important are lawyer fees”, I understand that now deeply. from here on out, you will not catch me without proper counsels (with an S) in place. that lesson was expensive. I am passing it to you for free.

build the fund. retain the attorney. sue when you should. do not turn the other cheek. that is the new luxury item and unlike a Birkin, it might actually save your life.

with love,

— Julian Addo

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