Ep. 73 - Overcoming Challenges with Tiffany Griffin

Tiffany is a psychologist by training and moved to North Carolina to start her professional journey in academia. She soon realized that this was not a good fit for her and she then moved to Washington D.C. where she worked as a federal policy maker in health policy. During those 7 years, she enjoyed her time in the government and also became a mom. She decided she wanted to do something entrepreneurial and moved back to North Carolina. She started making candles 5 years before launching her company with her husband as a hobby. She thought Bright Black would be a side job with research being her primary job but Bright Black took off.Tiffany wrote her business plan in the midst of a government shutdown while she was still working in DC at the end of 2018. She pulled together 5 years of thoughts and ideas. Their goal is to use scent to tell a story and it was a good way to have tough conversations about stereotypes and misunderstandings of black cultures. They wanted to break the connection between black and negativity by having a beautiful product that also allows people to have a good experience with dialogue and researching on their own to then share with their own communities. The work Tiffany did in the executive branch was on resilience. This experience helped her with the rapid growth in the midst of the pandemic and the challenges the pandemic placed on the company with supply chain shortages. They source everything from the US but still experience challenges. They still experienced growth because people were home and burning candles. They didn’t have jars or other materials available to keep up with growth. Despite these challenges, most people were very kind and understanding of their challenges. They communicated a lot and eventually made it through. Her biggest hurdle has been the supply chain issue of 2020. It was important to Tiffany to keep the same packaging for her product and she ended up making her own. Hard work hasn’t been enough. From the outside people think she’s crushing it but Tiffany has had moments where it hasn’t felt that way. Those moments have been hard for her.Her focus this year is to get her production space set up and figuring out how to engage with the public again. She knows this interaction is important to her brand. They are negotiating a contract with a large retailer which would give them a lot of momentum in addition to new limited edition scents coming out.