Black History Month – Highlighting Families Building Legacies Rooted in Love.
Happy Black History Month, Black Love Fam! This year, we’re celebrating the change-makers of the future while we pay homage to the past because Black History is happening every day! For the entire month of February, we’re highlighting couples, siblings, and families building a legacy rooted in Black love that are making history in their own way. Get ready for weekly stories from clothing designers, restaurant owners, creative artists, and more. Support these business owners and also let us know in the comments if there’s anyone you’d like for us to highlight next year! Wishing you a month of Black love, Black pride, and Black Joy.
Meet the Co-Founders of Nappy Head Club
Rachel Topping and Rikki Richelle Bryant
Location: Brooklyn, New York
Their Story: Nappy Head Club is a fashion and lifestyle brand dedicated to championing community and representation within the fashion industry. They are hyper-focused on using fashion to promote healing within the Black community by weaving intention, affirmations and altruism into each of their designs and business model.
Black Love: How did Nappy Head Club come to be?
Rachel: Nappy Head Club was actually the result of a vent session that Rikki and I had on the way to a shoot in Venice. We were talking about the lack of visibility of Type 4 Naturals, and how not seeing ourselves in fashion and beauty had negatively impacted the way we viewed ourselves. Our personal natural hair journeys had been more than just about embracing our hair, we’d really been undergoing a process to embrace ourselves and our identity as Black people. We wanted to share that feeling, to help more people to have those breakthroughs. So NHC started as an Instagram account, which at the time was @4conlyclub. We’d joked about names like “the beady-bead club” or the “I don’t have baby hairs club” or the “my hair shrinks up when it’s wet club,” haha. We weren’t taking ourselves too seriously, I think even now we’re careful to not make the brand too serious. We’re all on this journey together and none of us are perfect.
After about a year of being exclusively an online community, we began to make clothing. Rikki was styling at the time and I was doing graphic design for a luxury fashion brand, so it felt like a natural next step. The first shirt we released was “Make Black Nappy Again” which was a response to the Make America Great Again campaign that Trump was endorsing.
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Black Love: Share your earliest memory of Black History Month.
Rikki: My earliest memory of Black History month was in the second grade. I’ve never actually have been a great student, but it was when I was in the second grade where I really discovered my love for history and Black Culture. I remember at that time my teacher being really passionate about sharing the history of our ancestors. I found myself really excited about what we were learning. It’s something that’s really been instilled in me, even now, in my adulthood. I think back on that moment, and about the passion and excitement that my teacher had for that particular lesson has shaped my life.
Black Love: How do you encourage each other?
Rikki: We encourage each other by continuously supporting each other. We’re really each other’s biggest fans and admirers with our accomplishments. I think we’re always also pushing each other’s boundaries, seeing if we can take it further, introduce new concepts, etc. There’s a healthy dose of friendly competition in our dynamic, and I think that keeps us on our toes and wanting to be the best versions of ourselves.
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Black Love: Black love goes beyond just romantic relationships, it’s the love we have for our people. Nappy Head Club feels like a love letter to Black folk who don’t see themselves as the ideal standard of beauty, is that accurate?
Rachel: That’s exactly correct, you’ve hit it on the head. We’ve been existing in this world where the Eurocentric POV as seen as the “norm” and “the standard” in almost every aspect of life. That impacts your psyche, in sometimes insidious subconscious ways that we’re not even fully aware of. There have been studies conducted that show a lack of representation can have a tremendous impact on the way you view yourself and even your ability to navigate society. Nappy Head Club is our way of celebrating us in a way that is not often experienced. We’re here to question and upend every standard and every notion that’s been fed to us, and simply love on us.
Black Love: How does it feel to build a legacy alongside your sister?
Rachel: It’s really a great feeling. For me, building generational wealth was always a goal I’d had in the back of my mind. I was never really sure exactly how I was going to do that, but I was seeing the cycles, seeing the limitations within the corporate world, seeing poverty being passed down from generation to generation, and I’ve always been infuriated by it. To be able to build something so special, that impacts not just our family but all the creatives and team members and charities we’re able to pour into, it’s an amazing feeling. Our younger sister also helps with the brand now, and it’s really rewarding to be growing together. Rikki and I have a great creative dynamic, while we’re the same in a lot of ways we both have unique skillsets that really complement each other. I’m able to focus on technical design and Rikki really brings the pieces to life through editorial and styling. I feel really lucky to have a family that one actually shares similar interests and passions and two, that we can flow so well together to make something we’re both really proud of.
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